Sunday, October 16, 2011

Occupy Wall Street as a place to start

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

WOW Robert! Do you remember who was against the bail outs? Those crazy TEA Partiers were! You do also know that Wall St. backed Obama in 08! The probelm with Occupy Wall St. is that the problem is coming from Washington. the bigger the govt. becomes, the more corrupt it becomes.The entire financial crisis was the results of govt. interfering in banking and forcing banks to do subprime loans, which they then bundled them and sold them to Wall St. which we then had to pay for. You want these problems to go away? Shrink the government! BTW, did you know tha tthes protest were planned a year ago? No the yweren't spontanious. The plan was to cause the financial system to collapse, make everyone poor (except of course the ubber rich) so we all have to beg the government for our existance. Yes really! Go check out my blog, I've got it on there.
you know we're not that dissimilar, you and I, we are look at the same problem, you're just looking at it from the wrong side...lol

robertanton said...

I'll get back to you on that Jim, but if Bush would not have lifted regulations on Wall St and the banking industry; we never would have gotten into this mess.

Anonymous said...

Actually the The Gramm-Leach Act was signed in 1999. I don't think it was Bush who signed it. Besides, it wasn't the cause, the cause was subprime loans, that's wha tcreated the housing bubble. No subprime laons, no housing bubble, no buddled derivatives, no housing crisis no banking crisis.
We can both blame Bush for many things, but this wasn't his mess.

robertanton said...

Yes, I see that this was signed into Law by Clinton in 1999. Very bad move; but it's also not the 1st billions dollar bailout; remember the Savings and Loan scandal and subsequent bailout.
One of the reasons ppl are on the warpath all over the world is the pervasive greed of these large corporations.
These companies pull down billion dollar profits most quarters and continue to raise fees, charges, etc. on the poorest of their costumers while providing no better service or incentives. Where does it end?

robertanton said...

Let's not start re-writing history. the Tea Party wasn't formed until after TARP was already passed and in the hands of the greedy banking industry.

Anonymous said...

Actually the TEA Party was a result of the bail outs. It was the people tha twere pissed off about the bail outs and the debt that got together to protest them. They were people fed up with Washington taking our tax dollars and growing government making rules and then bailing companies out. I would never rewrite history, but I will give you a chance to relive it.

Here is the birth of the TEA Party
http://youtu.be/or-EKjfVCoA

And oh yes, people seem to forget that is was caused by the government forcing banks to make bad loans. It wasn't greed, it was government interference. It was tha tthe banks wanted to make bad loans, it was that they had to. The bundling and derivatives was a way to get out from under the bad paper. If you force someone to do something they don't want to do, and they find a way out of it, you can't blame them.

robertanton said...

Here's a good article on why this happened and Why the banks are at fault (with the support of the govt and Wall St.)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/owss-beef-wall-street-isnt-winning-its-cheating-20111025

Anonymous said...

I think your choice of article was an excellent point of conversation. First of all, The Federal reserve is a perfect example of government creating more problems then cures. The Fed was created to eliminate recessions from occurring. Since they founded it, recessions have occurred just as frequently but now last on average 3 times as long. Also since the Fed was created, inflation has increased at 3 times the rate previously. So here is validation on the first point. But let’s continue: The Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program is yet another example of government climbing in bed with the banks. Who do you think wrote these regulations? Now it’s ironic that this article points fingers for the bail outs, but not at the cause of the collapse. As we all know, it was government forcing the banks to make bad loans that caused the bubble and of course the banks looked for and found an out. It’s just like when this new banking regulation went into effect, and now people have to pay for their debit card, the banks found another way and the regulations only made things worse for us in the end. What I really find ironic is that I was one of the people complaining about the bailouts when they happened and when a bunch of us that were sick of the corruption got together, we were called racist, and all kinds of other foul things because we saw the corruption, but you see we saw where it came from, we saw who had the real power. They didn’t like that.
The only thing I can equate this too is this… It’s as if the OWS is protesting the drug dealers in the street and giving the drug king pins a pass. If you take down the dealers, the king pins will only put new ones in place. Wall St. isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom. Of course it’s corrupt, but it’s corrupt because Washington made it that way. Take the power from Washington and you take the power from the corrupt.
BTW, the reason there was no hatred during the Reagan years was simple. People got jobs, people climbed out of poverty, big corporations stagnated and small business grew.
Here’s a tip on understanding who is getting rich. When there is high inflation, the rich are getting rich, when inflation is low, everyone else is. Watch the inflation rate!

robertanton said...

"As we all know" No, we do not all know. I know that some ppl are always looking for simple answers to complex problems cause it makes their talking points more palatable to those of us who are busy and without the interest to constantly research and read up on the political games being played. These banking problems are multi-layered and the reasons for all these different bailouts always come back to the greed of bankers.

Please tell me why banks have to have billion dollar profits? Can't they settle for profits of a few million...maybe a hundred million? No, the gouge us while using our money to invest in less than reputable gambling schemes.

Washington is a place. It cannot be corrupt. The people in washington can be corrupt. The game can be corrupt. so tell me what we really need to change, the people, the rules of the game?

Anonymous said...

I'll play that game! So the government forces banks to make loans to people with bad credit to buy homes they can't afford. The banks don't want the paper so they sell it off in large bundles for deep discounts. So the large number of new buyers in the market because the prices of homes to shoot up forcing legitimate buyers to use riskier mortgages to buy homes with artificially high prices.
So what part of this do we not know?
Is it a good idea to force banks to make bad loans?
Once again, government gets involved, bad things happen.
You can blame the greed of the bankers all you like but if they hadn't been forced to make millions of bad loans they wouldn't have had much reason to get trillions in bail outs. From the ground up this whole thing was a bad idea. You don't reward people for bad behavior at any level. You don't loan people who have proven not to be responsible paying their bills money. You don't loan banks money when they fail in business. If your son stabs someone do you say "good boy" and give him a bigger knife?
If someone shows up late for work, goofs off all day, leaves early and sexually harasses other employees, do you give them a raise?
You can try to justify what Washington has done, but it will never hold water.
Oh, and as to your question about profits? I don't begrudge anyone making profits as long as they do it through legitimate means. The profits the banks are making were done with our money and at our cost. Funny Liberal were mocking us when we complained about the bail outs three years ago, you're not doing it now I noticed.

Merry Christmas Robert!