Is there a Republican candidate you like?

[Svartalf]

Ralph nader should show Jesus respect, that way people would feel better ignoring him.

[Schneibster]

He sure was right when he spotted the warning signs of the housing bubble back in 2002 and introduced legislation (that of course went no where) to try and stop it.

He wanted to interfere with Fanny and Freddy.

Fanny and Freddy had nothing to do with the problem. They weren't bundling mortgages into CDOs, and they didn't relax their mortgage standards. The failing mortgages weren't made by them; that was the banksters.

There’s a dangerous — and misleading — argument making the rounds about the causes of our current credit crisis. It’s emanating from Washington where politicians are engaging in the usual blame game but this time the stakes are so high that we can’t afford to fall victim to political doublespeak. In this fact-free zone, government sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the real estate bubble and subprime meltdown. It’s completely false. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were victims of the credit crisis, not culprits.

Start with the most basic fact of all: virtually none of the $1.5 trillion of cratering subprime mortgages were backed by Fannie or Freddie. That’s right — most subprime mortgages did not meet Fannie or Freddie’s strict lending standards. All those no money down, no interest for a year, low teaser rate loans? All the loans made without checking a borrower’s income or employment history? All made in the private sector, without any support from Fannie and Freddie.

Source.

Yet Wrong Paul wants to "fix Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac." I bet he'd've "fixed" 'em all right.

[Svartalf]

Plz, remind just what fanny and freedie are (or rather what makes them special, since I do know they are a lind of banking institution that was particularly involved in extending mortgage loans to people who cohld not get them from normal banks, or afford the rates practiced by those), and just how he wanted to fiddle with them?

Also, I notice that Mc Tyrant moved the goal posts. We could have had a housing bubble, probably had one not too far from bursting actually, without the crisis we have known for 3 years to happen. A bubble happens whenever a given commodity is ludicrously overpriced and people rush to the high yield investment without minding that it is bound to go down to more reasonable levels sooner or later. The current crisis went a step beyond that, when mortgage loaners decided to hedge their bets by selling the loans as a financial product, and bundling the less secure debts with better risks to make it look like a good investment. Then they relaxed their lending policies (and why not, they just sold them onto the SE at a nice profit and were instantly back into their money) to the point that bad debt rose, and when the people who took loans and shouldn't defaulted, it wasn't the banks that were in for their mistakes, it was everybody who had bought the toxic bonds..

[Schneibster]

Plz, remind just what fanny and freedie are (or rather what makes them special, since I do know they are a lind of banking institution that was particularly involved in extending mortgage loans to people who cohld not get them from normal banks, or afford the rates practiced by those), and just how he wanted to fiddle with them?

They are responsible for creating mortgage-backed securities, by buying mortgages and selling bonds that get paid back as the mortgages get paid back; not all mortgages, just the ones that would help most US citizens get a loan, and that were protected with adequate underlying house values and for which the borrowers had sufficient income to pay, and thereby help banks absorb the risk of non-prime (not subprime; that's a market they couldn't enter due to their documentation and income requirements) loans. Their rules for that bundling prohibit the types of loans that went into the so-called "toxic securities;" in fact, they lost market share to the people who would bundle those types of loans. This was primarily true because the ratings agencies rated their MBS' the same as the banksters' subprime-contaminated, "toxic" MBS'. Conservatives try to get away with this lie by conflating all MBS with FNMA and FHLMC MBS.

[Tyrannical]

Brand new Ron Paul "commercial", quite a funny one too.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXu5tR-m ... re=related[/youtube]

[Schneibster]

Love the little yarmulke on Bernanke. DOGWHISTLEfnord. Real classy.

[Svartalf]

Well, whether that's actually representative of today's bankers or not, he does happen to be Jewish.

[Tyrannical]

Love the little yarmulke on Bernanke. DOGWHISTLEfnord. Real classy.

I updated the video to a better quality version.
Bernanke isn't wearing a yarmulke, and the writing on it in the HD version says "helicopter ben" on it.

So I Googled "Helicopter Ben"

http://www.thestockenthusiast.com/opini ... right-now/

In that same speech he also discussed how the government can always avoid deflation by printing more dollars and referred to a statement made by Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winning economist, about using a helicopter drop of money to fight deflation. Since then, Bernanke has had the nickname of “Helicopter Ben.”

[Schneibster]

OK.

It looks like a yarmulke. He's got a Jewish-sounding name. It looks like a dogwhistle to me. I wouldn't use it.

[Tyrannical]

OK.

It looks like a yarmulke. He's got a Jewish-sounding name. It looks like a dogwhistle to me. I wouldn't use it.

While I suppose it can be mistaken for a yarmulke, the connection of Helicopter Ben with a propeller beanie is too obvious. And the below alternative is kind of dumb.

[Schneibster]

Just sayin'. I try to keep a few standards. No racial shit about Cain. No woman put downs about Palin or Bachmann. No Mormon jokes (and I know a few, they were hated and feared by my classmates' parents) about Romney. Just to keep it classy. I never liked the US-flag-swim-suited woman holding a gun with Palin's head 'shopped on. Not classy. See what I mean?

I don't see a problem with Helicopter Ben. That beanie? No. Bad idea. Propeller or not. Somebody's dogwhistling there. Not you. That's some pretty nasty bigoted propaganda. Quite subtle as well. Ugly stuff. I watch out for shit like that; your brain can get contaminated from it. Mental hygiene, man.

[Svartalf]

Thanks for slamming it into my face... it's interesting to notice that when Roman or Byzantine emperors, or some European Kings like Philip the Fair of France, used the kind of monetary politics Ben B has been advocating and implementing, they tended to face riots at best, full fledged rebellions in worse cases. And we're supposed to be surprised at protest movements against the money merchants of the world?

[Schneibster]

This austerity shit needs to stop. This is not the time for austerity. This is the time for governments to dig in and spend on infrastructure. We can help each other. But everyone has to do it. We all go into debt to each other, and we all get rich.

I'm not holding my breath. There's too many people whose achievement of their obsession relies on making it fail.

[Svartalf]

You know that to the morons in charge, "Keynes" is mangled so it takes only 4 letters to write it, right?

[Schneibster]

They don't like being told that their greed is the reason we keep having depressions.