Freddie needs to lower the quantity a tad and refine.

By 'one big fuckup' you mean Barney and Fannie and Freddie, right?

Whenever I listen to a cover of this song, it makes me want to listen to the original. No matter how good someone may be at covering Bohemian Rhapsody, and this is a good cover, no one does as well as Freddie Mercury

If Romney has earned this level of negative publicity then clearly 'he is the new front-runner' (Again!). every candidate thus far has suffered its consequence's, Bachmann's crazy tea-party rhetoric, possibly gay hubby & weird magazine picture & speaking off camera. Hermain Cain we'll just leave it there, 'you all know'. Newt and his staffing problems & taking donations of $1.6 million (that we know about) from Freddie Mac, Paul's Racists articles & letting people to die you aren't insured (As he must make his own choice?), and now coming full circle back to Santorums Bible thumping anti-gay fear-mongering & Romney taking exorbitant profit while CEO of Bain capital.

I never thought i'd see the day that when in a republican debate others on stage would voice any opposition to free market capitalism run a mock, quite an intriguing turn of events indeed.

Your video, EA ask Freddie W to make a Battlefield 3 TV ad, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 61 Badge!

I had a "Freddy the Fish" CD do this inside my computer right after I got my 52x CDRom - I have no idea how I managed to get the bits out but it worked fine after that and never happened again...

>> ^westy:

You are aware that deregulation of the market is what cussed the current economic climete ?

To a point yes, but not in the way you think. What caused the problem was throwing loans to people who should never have gotten them via forced regulation of the mortgage system. A lovely harkening to the days of Clinton, Carter and others. While various democrats in power screamed "racist" whenever reforms were sought to tighten the controls back up. It's pretty damn obvious to anyone who's lived outside the US. You don't allow high risk loans to risky people, but the government not only said it was okay to do it(freddie and fanny), but forced the banks to do it otherwise they'd loose their secured depositor status.


It doesn't help that 100 years of Keynesian economic policies(aka lets throw money at it), didn't help either. Keynesian solutions sow their own doom in the future, either by steering a sector of the market, or by trying to fully steer various markets.





>> ^Asmo:


http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2010/04/american-wage-stagnatio
nposner.html

Never mind losing their job, or their house. It's hard to live the American dream when you're unemployed and facing being homeless...
You can understand why the working class are getting pissed and the republicans are scared shitless about it. And holdouts like QM, with his quaint little almost racial slurs and real bad ass insults (occupoopers... lol, what are you, 6? Or is that your IQ?), are just a pebble before the avalanche. Europe goes under and the US slides back in to recession, you may well see a decent reenactment of the French revolution on Wall St.


Wait, you think it's the republicans that the public are pissed at? Do you even look at the polling data and methodology? They're tired of the new "hope and change" which equaled broke, and I'm out of a job. Hell if you run the correction numbers since Obama and the dem's took office, the unemployment rate would be up around 11%. The "occupiers" are a subset of a subset of people, who don't even come close to reflecting the mainstreet. Republican's aren't scared of that, though the Dem's who supported them sure seem to be. Since the occupiers poison touch sure has tanked many dem's numbers who 'supported' them.

Get yours cargo container while you can. The collapse of America will start in 2013.
From Business Insider:
A) The Bush tax cuts on those making more than $200k will expire.
B) The Bush tax cuts on those making less than $200k will also expire.
C) The Patch on AMT will expire.
D) The 2% payroll tax holiday will expire for all workers on 12/31/12 (I’m sure the current holiday will be rolled for another year)
E) The 99-week extended unemployment benefits die on 12/31. (The emergency benefits will also be extended for 2012)

F) There will have to be a budget that is approved. Alternatively, a series of continuing resolutions is required to avert a government shutdown. We have not had an approved budget in over 900 days.

G) 2013 is the first year that there will be mandatory caps on discretionary spending. These limits will result in a YoY decline in government spending.

H) The Federal Reserve has promised to keep interest rates at zero into 2013. While it is possible that the Fed could continue the madness for even longer, the reality is that interest rates have nowhere to go but up.

I) By January 2013 it will be painfully evident that the country’s key social programs, Social Security and Medicare will be running in the red at a pace that is far higher than anyone considered possible. The need for dramatic changes in these programs will have to come onto the table. The implications of this will be significant.

J) In 2013 the issues of Fannie, Freddie, FHA and the Federal Home Loan Banks must be addressed. The problems at the housing agencies has festered too long.

K) The country will face another debt ceiling extension. The last time cost us our AAA.

L) At some point in 2012 economic events (Probably Europe) will force the Fed into yet another round of QE. More LSAP and another increase in the Fed’s balance sheet. But when completed the Fed will have fired it’s last bullet. QE-3 will not achieve any better results than QE-1 or 2. The policy will be discredited as it achieves nothing positive and causes inflation. There are no credible options left for the Fed to fight the slowdown that HAS to occur when the effects of A – K are felt.


America looks like Mexico of the 70’s – 90’s. The last election cycle brought us the biggest economic crisis in 70 years. The next election will be no different. Dozens of landmines have been planted. They are timed to go off in 2013. Some may be fixed, others kicked further down the road. However the odds of the country addressing all of the things that have been programmed to explode is, in my opinion, close to zero. One or more of these things is going to trip us up. There are too many big issues to confront.

It was not Republicans pushing the Community Reinvestment Act, it was Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Even W warned that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in danger of insolvency.

Also no one in gov't has anything to do with the cost of higher education, which has been a sore point for the '99%'. You can blame your multi-million dollar university presidents for that boondoggle.

>> ^silvercord:

Here is that link again. I don't know why it crashed earlier.
It absolutely supports the argument for the very reason that UPS is unionized. Corporations exist to turn a profit. Many of them can support union employees. The government, on the other hand, does not exist to make money. It simply cannot fund the same types of benefits the private sector does.

The title of the article you're linking:

USPS made $76M profit in April (before $458M retiree health charge turned it into a loss)

Part of the issue that I didn't even delve into before is that USPS isn't really a good example of a public sector organization to begin with. It's not taxpayer funded, and hasn't been for 30 years. It's a lot closer to Fannie and Freddie than it is to the fire department.

But even setting that aside there's no causal link between unionization and the USPS financial problems, even according to the article you linked. Hell, they point out that wage and benefit costs have dropped.

So why tout the USPS's problems as another strike against public sector unions, its problems have nothing to do with unions, and would be profitable if it weren't for the stupid pre-paid benefits rule?

But that's just nitpicking, really. The real problem with the argument you're making is that it assumes that unions universally make unreasonable demands, and then usually get those unreasonable demands met.

Public sector benefits aren't generous because unions have fleeced the American people, they're generous because the private sector has drastically curtailed benefits (and unions!), while the public sector has been much more gradual in reducing them. Even still, public sector jobs generally pay people less than the private sector would offer them at their education and experience, even after you factor in benefits.

And even if that were not the case, and this was a matter of unions asking for too much, it is still a negotiation. Government employers can negotiate benefit cuts and wage cuts -- and in fact in most places the unions have agreed to rather sharp cuts during the recession!

Taking away the ability for public sector workers to organize is a political maneuver, not a budget concern. The idea on offer is to use a temporary crisis to put in place a permanent change in policy, in order to further their longer-range ideological and political goals.

Uhh, Cenk really needs to source his info, because he's wrong about a few things.

For one, HARP is only offered to people whose mortgages are owned by Fannie and Freddie. No Bank of America mortgages are eligible.

Second, all of Fannie and Freddie's loans are guaranteed by the government. Pre-crisis people assumed that was the case, and post-crisis that's been explicitly stated by the government.

Third, "loan guarantee" doesn't mean you can commit fraud. One can make a moral hazard argument, and say that loan guarantees will encourage banks to make loans it thinks are likely to fail, but it doesn't make actually doing so legal. It also ignores that Congress has always been fastidious about Fannie and Freddie's lending standards for exactly this reason.

If I didn't know better, I'd guess Cenk got this from some sort of right-wing spam e-mail, not from actual due diligence research.

The government forced them to create CDO's? to bundle up non-AAA holdings and sell them as AAA? to extend themselves beyond their ability to cover their loses?

In a word - yes - the government forced the issue. Before the government interfered, lenders had actuarial tables and KNEW with 100% certainty who could and couldn't afford a loan the second they walked in the door. Mortgage rates were in the 8% to 10% range. Banks 'made' money on loans with the interest. People who earned less than 30K a year had a tough time getting into a house because (DUH!) they didn't really earn enough money. It was common sense. People that were POOR couldn't just go out and buy houses willy-nilly.

Then the government came along. They wanted people to get loans cheaper and more often and entirely for political reasons. But banks aren't charities and if they can't make the money on the interest (which you can't with sub-prime) then how do you make money? Hmmm... Oh yeah - let's get rid of this little thing called "Glass Steagall"! Now let's use the Fed to jack around interest rates until they are below 5%. Now you banks are commanded by government to make your profits by bundling the loans as derivatives. Now it is almost impossible to survive as a lending institution without doing what we tell you. Oh yeah, you banks? When it all blows up down the road it is YOUR fault... There you go banks!

That was government meddling with the market. They changed the rules so Barney Frank could tell voters that they had "UFFODUBBLE HOW-SING!". It was true left-wing, neolib stupidity on parade and it screwed up the entire planet. They were the ones that changed the laws. The private sector had no choice but to react to the rules that government barfed up.

The system that GOVERNMENT established turned the housing market within a very short time from a staid system of "moderate loans paid off by interest" into a crazed gold-rush of "cheap loans for everyone paid off by bundling". Banks had no choice to play that game because that was playing field that GOVERNMENT created. Any bank offering a SANE loan at an 8% interest rate and making its profits over 30 years was getting clobbered by lenders handing out loans at 2.5% ARMs that were making a bundle on the back end. Banks knew it was crazy, but those were the rules that GOVERNMENT set up and they didn't have any choice but to operate within that rubric. But government said, "Hey - if the loans blow up don't worry about it! We'll cover those bad loans with Freddie/Fannie and you won't be on the hook for it..." Government.

You see, that's what that happens when government interferes with the market and picks the winners and losers by changing rules, laws, and policy. The whole thing would have been impossible without a corrupt government starting the ball rolling for political purposes.

Everybody on the planet learned after the Great Depression that having an 'environment' where bundling and other such investments could exist was not good. That's why Glass-Stegall was created. It stopped a BAD investment practice and it worked for over 50 years without government being "involved" in a single, bloody thing. That's what !good! government does. It establishes a simple, basic set of rules and then STOPS INTERFERING. The reason for the housing failure was not because government WASN'T regulating the market. It was because the government WAS regulating the market in a terrible way.

Reinstate Glass-Steagall - a common sense law - and then ban the government from EVER interfering with the housing sector again. Things work just fine when you set up a simple, transparent system and then forbid the government from coming within a million miles of it.

Only a dogmatic right winger could say that with a straight face. And in the later sentence you proved it. You're so convinced it couldn't have been the free market, you are willing to accept any explanation for the economic collapse that pinned most of the blame on the government.

And it's categorically absurd. Yes, absolutely, the gov't played a role, but the overwhelming majority of the collapse was due to derivatives and CDOs. The only conceivable explanation for the gov't being the primary root cause is either they didn't regulate as they should have, which actually ends up being the antithesis of your argument because it advocates gov't taking a much more involved role from here on out, or it's because of initiatives by the gov't to increase homeownership by giving loans out to people who had little chance to pay it back. Of the later, the simple fact of the matter is the vast majority of the subprime loans were given out by subprime lenders, not Fannie and Freddie, before Fannie and Freddie entered into that market. Even when considering in the end all subprime loans including Fannie and Freddie, the odds of default on subprime loans were several fold higher with subprime lenders than Fannie/Freddie.

And why did CDOs containing subprime loans get pushed up into investment vehicles that could be purchased by retirement programs like 401k, etc., which fueled their growth? Fannie and Freddie backed loans and non-Fannie/Freddie backed loans were both in funds rated AAA by ratings agencies that were not regulated by the US gov't. Instead, they were paid by the investment houses that gave them the investment funds to rate in the first place. No gov't agency put a gun to their head and made them slap lipstick on those pigs.

Absolutely, Fannie and Freddie helped to legitimize subprime lending, but the simple fact of the matter is Fannie and Freddie were late to the subprime game. They even thought that they almost had to in order to, survey says, COMPETE THE MORTGAGE MARKET! Oh yes, that's right, they were compelled to enter into these dangerous loans because they were losing market share to the Countrywide's of the mortgage industry. While gov't certainly liked the idea of the result in increased home ownership rates this would cause, no gov't agency put a gun to their heads to issue subprime loans specifically. They chose to jump into those waters.

The Great Recession is in the end more about what happens when the free market, particularly the financial sector, isn't regulated effectively. I don't blame the financial industry for inventing derivatives and CDOs. Both instruments can be used to reduce risk for all parties involved, and potentially to the entire system. But they inadvertently created a system that led to its own collapse because no entity watched over the system as a whole. How could the investment banks have known they comprised entities that should any of them fail, they would cause the entire system to collapse because of the intricate web of these CDOs and derivatives? How could they possibly know AIG was overextended on derivatives? They simply aren't equipped or structured to know this. But some entity should have, and the ONLY possible answer is the gov't. I'm even sympathetic to the view the gov't as is cannot possibly do this, but that means we need to fashion a gov't that can. It's the only answer.

>> ^lantern53:

Now Wall St. may have fouled up but it was the US gov't which was holding the gun to it's head. Only a gov't could foul things up this badly.

>> ^Ryjkyj:

NO, seriously. Why is no one on the show refuting this statement? Is there something I don't know? Is this the latest bullshit that we're telling ourselves?


My understanding of the situation is if you take TARP, by itself, not the multi-trillion gift from the FED, and don't account for inflation, then the US government has more cash now than they put in.

It all depends what you mean when you say "the bailout".

We all paid in inflation for the the FED giving money out of thin air before TARP was even proposed, but nobody is even pretending to claim that we go that back, they are just pretending it did not happen.

At the end of the day TARP is a problem because it privileged banks over citizens, not because it cost tax dollars.

Congress could have simply handed $0.25T to Fannie and Freddy instead and told them to buy up all "toxic mortgages" at market rate, and then renegotiated them to keep people in their homes. We could have tippled our money, and gotten the poison off the bank balance sheets, stabilizing the banks, and benefiting the citizenry of the country.

The problem with that plan is that the big fish in the market profit from constructed scarcity, so any scarcity reducing plan like that goes right out the window.

I'll give him credit for somebody to love, but this wasn't even close.

The quartet was completely off, and for fucks sake, FREDDIE DIDN'T ENUNCIATE!

In terms of a cover, this was decent. In terms of the second coming of Freddie Mercury, nah, not even close.

Maybe it's just because Bohemian Rhapsody is my favouritest queen song of all time that I'm being so critical, but I'm going to go listen to the original now to get this outta my head.