Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

That's a good and interesting point. Maybe an extinction event is like a real estate bubble - it's hard to tell when you're inside one.

I would like a true accounting as much as the next guy. I want to know where the failout money went, every last penny. I want arguments with real facts and figures, and we don't have them. (Example: Outsourcing. Is it really a problem? How many jobs were actually outsourced? In what fields)?


I agree with you 100%, and I think most people would too. It's my money too dang nab it; true capitalism has no bailouts. The problem today is that we have a corporate-socialist-capitalist government. In other words, the banks got a bailout and the people didn't. I speak for myself here when I say that any amount of money spent on somebody else's greed (whether it's personal buying a house, or corporate buying toxic mortgages) was a waste of money. People talked about the real-estate bubble bursting since 2004; everyone had 3 years to get their act together (capital gains on homes is 2 years, so they had plenty of time to refinance or sell), yet some actually paid attention and limited their losses, and others believed that during recession (2001) it still made sense that house prices were on the rise.


Everything is political. Everything. When the cleverer politicos "respond" to these mobs, the "solutions" will be far worse than the original problems. That's government in action.


I agree with you here as well. I like the practice of democracy and I don't have an issue with these people voicing their concerns, and like I said before, I don't see this problem solved by any existing politician today. I have no faith in the federal government, Democrat or Republican. So far I am liking the movement, I am giving them the benefit of the doubt, like I did with the Tea Party. The moment I see the OWS people align with an existing corrupt party (choose your flavor), then I'll polarize against it.

Good day to you.

>> ^quantumushroom:

I appreciate the work that went into your response and I read all of it. "Leaderless" movement? Don't believe it.

I would like a true accounting as much as the next guy. I want to know where the failout money went, every last penny. I want arguments with real facts and figures, and we don't have them. (Example: Outsourcing. Is it really a problem? How many jobs were actually outsourced? In what fields)?

Everything is political. Everything. When the cleverer politicos "respond" to these mobs, the "solutions" will be far worse than the original problems. That's government in action.



>> MonkeySpank:[snip]

Straight upvote, because there's nothing like "thirty" spoken in an Irish accent.

And a *promote on top, because the Irish have a fifth problem, and it's a game breaker: they have no feasible business model.

Financed by EU subsidies, fueled by the lowest company taxes and no real regulation, they based their whole economic system on two basic pillars, the financial sector and multinational corporations. By now, we should all know the first one is worse than cancer. And the second one, Ireland as the European FOB for US corporations, allowed Google amongst all the other crooks to get away with a tax rate of 2.4%. Here's one little fact a well-ignored economist stated back in 2001(!): Irish GNP was about 80% of Irish GDP. So 20% of the cake belonged to foreign corporations. How feasible is that? Add a housing bubble that - relative to size - puts the US real estate bubble to shame and you get a glimpse of just how fucked the Irish really are.

And just a few months ago, Ireland was the fucking hero for all those mainstream economists. "Copy the Irish model", they said. And don't believe for a second that the Irish - or the Greeks, Portuguese, Spanish for that matter - can pay back their debt. No chance in hell, they are done, financially. So it's a haircut and either finally the financial unity within the EU or the whole thing blows up in our faces. We need a European tax model, so the Irish for instance can't low-ball on corporate taxes, and reasonable wages based on productivity first and foremost, so the Germans stop ruining the rest of the bloody Union. Minimum wages and minimum taxes or the game is over.

Edit: My sympathies to the Irish anyway, the proposed cuts are pointless and a social disaster. Same as in Greece, workers get dogged for what the bankers and the government fucked up. Only Iceland seems to do the right thing at this time. Put CEOs and the lot in a Eurostar and send 'em off to France, they still have some guillotines in store.

Beck is easy fodder and this segment seems to be implying that gold's price is a result of illegitimate fear and not actual currency debasement worldwide. Not even Beck's massive ego can affect the price of gold. Gold began going up years ago when Greenspan lowered interest rates to 1% and blew up the real estate bubble.

http://www.kitco.com/charts/popup/au3650nyb.html

The Fed's continued policy of inflation, the arbitrary creation of dollar units at no labor or material cost, is what is making dollars less scarce relative to gold. Yes, the real estate bubble was allowed to collapse about halfway, but gold continues to rise in anticipation of the banks eventually loaning all that bailout money they received. It can't just sit on the sidelines forever, either it's retracted and we pay the piper, or it's loaned out. The problem with loaning it out is that we may lose key buyers of our debt. A bond is a promise to pay future dollars, and if we are rapidly decreasing their scarcity relative to goods, it becomes a losing proposition to buy bonds at such a low interest rate. Some of the largest purchasers of gold are foreign central banks, which are currently VASTLY underinvested in gold. China has only 1% of its reserves in gold, the rest is paper. India recently bought 200 metric tons.

I will start believing in the gold bubble crowd when I stop seeing those infomercials getting highly indebted Americans to SELL their gold for paper. You talk to the typical person the street, and they're still oblivious to what gold represents, and those that do are not buying, but selling. This is just the beginning of a huge bull run, and it's kind of hilarious to see some people calling the top over and over again. Peter Schiff wrote a funny article in 2006 about what a gold bubble would actually look like.

http://www.kitco.com/ind/Schiff/apr252006.html

Regulation of Credit Default Swaps would have significantly reduced, and possibly eliminated the problem we are currently having, we would not have had as large a real-estate bubble, nor as large a crash, banks would probably not have evaporated under the strain of what remained.

As for throwing money at the solution, I don't really buy that it will be done in a way that helps. If I had to solve it I would spend every penny on infrastructure, which is in effect a blanket subsidy of the economy, without being a "stick it in your pocket and run away" sort of bail-out, as we saw with the banks.

Spending on regulation and enforcement could have helped, but at this point I don't really expect anything but crash and burn. When mobs of people are starving in the street, then Washington will pay to put them all back to work rebuilding the electrical grid, mostly because that's cheaper than prison, or revolution, until then I don't think much of what they spend will do any good.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'bill maher, real estate bubble, credit crunch' to 'bill maher, real estate bubble, credit crunch, dan savage' - edited by MycroftHomlz

>> ^Tofumar:
BansheeX said: "First of all, I can't believe someone just defended welfare and Social Security. Like, seriously, can't believe it. I just vomited in my own freaking lap."
If you "can't believe someone would defend" our social programs, then you should probably put down your copy of Atlas Shrugged and get out more. Most people across the American political spectrum support the continued funding of these programs in one form or another, to greater and lesser extents.
So, I guess that means you'll need to take some Pepto Bismol with you. You should also take along a copy of Baker and Weisbrot's "Social Security: The Phony Crisis," but you'll have to stop wretching long enough to read it.


Yeah, just reference a terrible book full of utopian expectations and a distorted view of our economic situation without addressing the numbers themselves, or any of the numerous logic and moral cruxes with the system itself, which I've explained to you in great detail above. That book hilariously assumed we have a trust fund. We don't. It wrongly assumes that our economy has been growing and will continue to grow, and that we can expect this growth to fund the system indefinitely. However, it hasn't grown. We've had a borrow and spend economy that is increasingly dependent on foreign creditors who are eventually going to pull the plug when they figure out that lending money to over-leveraged americans who won't be able to pay it back is a terrible investment. When the gold standard was abolished by Nixon in 1971, it gave the government the power to print money at will to fund whatever it wanted without having to follow a budget or propose tax increases in order to fund psychotic wars and deleterious socialist programs that the ignorant and manipulated populace is too dumb to oppose. People pay indirectly through inflation (an incremental misdirection that causes average folk to blame products themselves and not the fed) and eventually economic depression. The fed has been creating bubbles to avoid a recession for a long time and to create the illusion of steady economic growth. In reality, we've gone from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation, we've gone from a manufacturing based economy to a service based economy, we've gone from a trade surplus to a trade deficit, and when the US Dollar collapses, products that were once going to non-productive Americans with false prosperity based on debt will start going to the producers themselves, the Chinese of the world. But hey, as long as your pretty numbers are going up and your confidence in the system is retained by government and corporate propoganda, the unlimited credit card strategy of growth seems infinitely sustainable, right? Do yourself a favor and start listening to truly smart economists who aren't blinded by these things and whose predictions have actually come true.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=rhJaVEWAG24
http://youtube.com/watch?v=emvMqjtcO7o
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ywLt1AebjMY

Greenspan converted the tech stock bubble losses into a bigger real estate bubble in the late 90s order to delay that recession (people WANT constant growth, so they elect people who stave off a recession without realizing that what they're doing is frosaking small immediate pain for larger future pain). The real estate bubble just started its collapse. The stimulus package is another political move in which the government is borrowing more money that ultimately does more harm than good Americans because it comes at the cost of more inflation and eroding international trust. It is attempting to solve over-spending with more over-spending.

The stock market "grows" nominally every year, but that's when it's priced in dollars and the value of the dollar is being debased with inflation which is also much higher than the fed is letting on with its fudged CPI measurements. So if you have 8% annual inflation and a 10% gain on the stock market, it's really only gained 2% legitimate growth over the year. If you price the stock markets in something which can't be debased, an asset like gold, the markets have been declining for the past decade. People need to wake up to this. This is how the system works, it's intentionally confusing so that the average person like yourself just thinks everything is okay.