Obama up 8 points

[Kidlicious]

[Naked Gents Rut]

Deregulation permitted lending institutions like Countrywide to disregard previous requirements and to lend on whatever terms they felt like -- like Ninja loans (no income, no job, no assets).

Deregulation allowed institutions to "bundle" these mortgages into packages and to sell them as securities.

No rules. No oversight. No clue to what was going on.

You can't blame that on "deregulation" unless you can point to previous regulations that prevented such activity that were repealed by Republicans.

I agree that a lack of new regulation was a problem, but it was the Republicans who were proposing new regulation on the mortgage industry and Democrats who were opposing it.

[rah]

Then I guess we don't need to bother with the election since it's already been predetermined. While I agree that it looks bad for McCain, there is still almost a month to go.
Rezko is currently spilling his guts to the feds right now, so Obama better be hoping nothing new pops up. But the odds are that our guv is "the one" that's going to go down. But you never know.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut


You can't blame that on "deregulation" unless you can point to previous regulations that prevented such activity that were repealed by Republicans.

I agree that a lack of new regulation was a problem, but it was the Republicans who were proposing new regulation on the mortgage industry and Democrats who were opposing it.

The mortage industry is not the one causing the credit squeeze, its the finance industry that is causing that. Last time I looked, Bear Sterns and Lehman weren't in the business of making bad mortages. Its financial deregulation, something Republicans pushed through, that led to this financial mess.

[Naked Gents Rut]

The credit crunch is directly traceable back to the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, GePap. Don't talk about things you don't understand.

[Asher]

Originally posted by GePap


The mortage industry is not the one causing the credit squeeze, its the finance industry that is causing that. Last time I looked, Bear Sterns and Lehman weren't in the business of making bad mortages. Its financial deregulation, something Republicans pushed through, that led to this financial mess.

Lehman and Bear Sterns were very much involved with the mortgage mess. Very, very much. They dealt a lot of asset-backed securities -- care to guess what kind of assets made up much of those securities?

[Naked Gents Rut]

We need Kitty and TCO back on Poly. Their conversation about the crisis over at CG is light years ahead of the attempts here.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut
The credit crunch is directly traceable back to the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, GePap. Don't talk about things you don't understand.

The more I do learn about this, the stupider your talk appears.

The credit crunch can be traced to bad mortages BECAUSE financial institutions began playing around with complex instruments they invented to "spread the risk" of these mortages they knew to be bad, and then traders went to town playing with these instruments and insurance on them. No one put a gun to the heads of traders to create tools to hide the obvious risk of bad loans, no one forces traders to buy and sell insurance credits on assets they never held, and to do all of this on leverage.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut
We need Kitty and TCO back on Poly. Their conversation about the crisis over at CG is light years ahead of the attempts here.

Maybe they don't have anyone to contest their claims. Why aren't they here?

[Arrian]

I keep coming back to that analysis.

The mortgage situation, egged on by F&F and of course the gummint, was bad enough. I do think F&F should cease to be, and more rational lending standards must be applied (already are, IIRC). That said, this thing was magnified dramatically by Wall Street.

I'm fine with laying blame on F&F (and by extension the bigshot Dems who were up to their eyeballs in protecting them recently). But that ain't all. Not by a longshot.

-Arrian

[Asher]

Originally posted by Kidicious


Maybe they don't have anyone to contest their claims. Why aren't they here?

They're not on the same side.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Asher


Lehman and Bear Sterns were very much involved with the mortgage mess. Very, very much. They dealt a lot of asset-backed securities -- care to guess what kind of assets made up much of those securities?

As just as I told Drakie Pooh, their sin was not just trading said assets, but trading them in an utterly indiscriminate and irresponsible manner, in buying and selling things on leverage, and in willfully and blindly ignoring the default risk because they thought their neat little computer programs had figured out all the risks. They were also stupid enough to think housing values would always go up.

Those were all sins of the traders and their bosses, connected to bad mortages only in the sense that those were the assets they decided to play with, even though any idiot should have seen those were the "assets" that they should have kept at arms length.

I doubt that Freddie and Fannie would have been able to make many bad mortage loans had they been unable to find willing and ready buyers for the instruments they created. And who was responsible for making sure of the underlying value and strenght of these supposed "assets"? The companies that bought them and then went to town, and then thought up of a new and neat way to make money by trading credit default swaps as well.

[Asher]

Originally posted by GePap


As just as I told Drakie Pooh, their sin was not just trading said assets

Don't mind me, I'm just correcting an obvious false statement.

You said:

The mortage industry is not the one causing the credit squeeze, its the finance industry that is causing that.

The mortgage industry is fundamentally what caused lots of bad bets at the financial institutions to bite them in the ass. There's lots of blame to spread here, but to claim the mortgage industry is not causing the credit crunch is to not understand the basics of the problem.

[Naked Gents Rut]

The credit crunch can be traced to bad mortages BECAUSE financial institutions began playing around with complex instruments they invented to "spread the risk" of these mortages they knew to be bad, and then traders went to town playing with these instruments and insurance on them. No one put a gun to the heads of traders to create tools to hide the obvious risk of bad loans, no one forces traders to buy and sell insurance credits on assets they never held, and to do all of this on leverage.

The complex financial instruments you're blaming weren't invented to hide ****ty mortgages and work quite well at distributing risk when used correctly. The problem comes about when you back them with loads of ****ty sub-prime mortgages. No sub-prime, no crisis.

That being said, the Wall Street types were morons for buying up the **** mortgage-backed securities Fannie, Freddie and others were peddling and deserve to lose their ass.

[Arrian]

By the way, I'm all for the return of KH and TCO. Especially as CG is blocked from work...

-Arrian