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[Jude]

"Right" and "left" both have a lot of potential meanings - in the US, they tend to correlate, but it's not always that way in a lot of other places. For example there's no logical connection between being homophobic, bigoted, xenophobic, etc., and being a fiscal conservative, but for some reason in the US the people that call themselves fiscal conservatives also tend to be those things.

Fascism and communism are quite different economically, but end up both being quite authoritarian. They're also theoretically different socially, since fascism actually prizes state control and obedience to authority, whereas communism emphasizes control BY the people. The only problem is that communism demands people to behave in ways that are entirely against human nature and so to enforce its ideas, totalitarianism is necessary.

[Andir]

"Right" and "left" both have a lot of potential meanings - in the US, they tend to correlate, but it's not always that way in a lot of other places. For example there's no logical connection between being homophobic, bigoted, xenophobic, etc., and being a fiscal conservative, but for some reason in the US the people that call themselves fiscal conservatives also tend to be those things.

That's why I differentiated political conservative and fiscal conservative earlier... modern US political conservative is a floating definition.

The modern conservatives tend to want things like it was when they were kids (50/60s/early 70s era, heavily religious, post war euphoric) and they are fighting to keep things that way.

The new generation (late 70s/80s/90s post vietnam, anti-war) are coming in being labeled as liberal because they want change in government from the previous regime... the bad thing is that there are two different forks to this change.

There are people like myself that want to return to the pre-WW United States where we get out of mucking around the world affairs and concentrate on getting things fixed at home and there are the people that think we need to unify the world in some social landscape under some feel good Utopia of heavy government and defies the US roots of individualism.  They believe in this Utopian Government while ignoring the heavy handedness that goes on creating big brother scenarios.  I'd quote Benjamin Franklin on security and liberty here, but I don't think I need to.  The Constitution was setup to form a country of adults cooperating with each other and we've all turned into children bickering over a toy in the isles of a store.

Fanciful hopes aside:  I do, however, think we can live a peaceful coexistence with Europe without taking up the whole socialism flag and preserving our individual rights, but there are those that don't think that will work.  YMMV.

[Bauglir]

Well we seem to have a fairly good precedent for that all of a sudden.

And we only have such a precedent because of overly strict politics and regulation... (ie: forcing banks to give loans to people who can't afford them then wondering why AIG, et al. went "nuts up")

That's the opposite of what happened. Banks were allowed to give loans to people who couldn't afford them because of LOWER regulations, and did so on the basis that they could always sell the loan to another bank or foreclose on the house in question or salvage the loan some other way if something went wrong, because they had a lot of models about loan payment returns that told them they'd make more profit by getting more people to take out loans. The people taking those loans were stupid, yes, but you can't seriously believe that banks were forced to make them, considering the extent to which cheap, easy-qualification loans were marketed lately.

[Andir]

Well we seem to have a fairly good precedent for that all of a sudden.

And we only have such a precedent because of overly strict politics and regulation... (ie: forcing banks to give loans to people who can't afford them then wondering why AIG, et al. went "nuts up")

That's the opposite of what happened. Banks were allowed to give loans to people who couldn't afford them because of LOWER regulations, and did so on the basis that they could always sell the loan to another bank or foreclose on the house in question or salvage the loan some other way if something went wrong, because they had a lot of models about loan payment returns that told them they'd make more profit by getting more people to take out loans. The people taking those loans were stupid, yes, but you can't seriously believe that banks were forced to make them, considering the extent to which cheap, easy-qualification loans were marketed lately.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act  This was setup to encourage banks to loan to poor families despite them being denied loans as a poor investment.

is a United States federal law designed to encourage commercial banks and savings associations to meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.[1][2][3]  Congress passed the Act in 1977 to reduce discriminatory credit practices against low-income neighborhoods, a practice known as redlining.[4][5]  The Act requires the appropriate federal financial supervisory agencies to encourage regulated financial institutions to meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered, consistent with safe and sound operation (Section 802.). To enforce the statute, federal regulatory agencies examine banking institutions for CRA compliance, and take this information into consideration when approving applications for new bank branches or for mergers or acquisitions (Section 804.).[6]

(ie: more regulation, not less... to encourage loans to poor investments...)

Maybe you read a different version of history?

[Zangi]

@Andir interesting...

I was the opinion of Bauglir before seeing this....

[LegoLord]

Fanciful hopes aside:  I do, however, think we can live a peaceful coexistence with Europe without taking up the whole socialism flag and preserving our individual rights, but there are those that don't think that will work.  YMMV.

You do realize that few (if any?) European countries are fully or even mostly socialistic in their government structure and policies, right?  One way to put it, I suppose, is that they've taken up multiple "flags", as you call them.

[kuro_suna]

Well we seem to have a fairly good precedent for that all of a sudden.

And we only have such a precedent because of overly strict politics and regulation... (ie: forcing banks to give loans to people who can't afford them then wondering why AIG, et al. went "nuts up")

That's the opposite of what happened. Banks were allowed to give loans to people who couldn't afford them because of LOWER regulations, and did so on the basis that they could always sell the loan to another bank or foreclose on the house in question or salvage the loan some other way if something went wrong, because they had a lot of models about loan payment returns that told them they'd make more profit by getting more people to take out loans. The people taking those loans were stupid, yes, but you can't seriously believe that banks were forced to make them, considering the extent to which cheap, easy-qualification loans were marketed lately.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act  This was setup to encourage banks to loan to poor families despite them being denied loans as a poor investment.

That only prevents them from blacklisting a entire area, regardless much of the bad debt is from middle class people who bough big houses and cars even if rush has been using it as a excuse to blame everything on poor people and immigrants.

The banks aren't being forced to do anything. They did it because it inflates their company's stock value as long as nobody asks for details about their assets, note the boom before the bust.

[kuro_suna]

That's why I differentiated political conservative and fiscal conservative earlier... modern US political conservative is a floating definition.

The modern conservatives tend to want things like it was when they were kids (50/60s/early 70s era, heavily religious, post war euphoric) and they are fighting to keep things that way.

political conservatism is usually a mix of both,

fiscal conservatism is a watered down libertarianism

social conservatism is the cranky old men that idealize the world they grew up in at the expense of any grounding in reality

[Bauglir]

Well we seem to have a fairly good precedent for that all of a sudden.

And we only have such a precedent because of overly strict politics and regulation... (ie: forcing banks to give loans to people who can't afford them then wondering why AIG, et al. went "nuts up")

That's the opposite of what happened. Banks were allowed to give loans to people who couldn't afford them because of LOWER regulations, and did so on the basis that they could always sell the loan to another bank or foreclose on the house in question or salvage the loan some other way if something went wrong, because they had a lot of models about loan payment returns that told them they'd make more profit by getting more people to take out loans. The people taking those loans were stupid, yes, but you can't seriously believe that banks were forced to make them, considering the extent to which cheap, easy-qualification loans were marketed lately.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act  This was setup to encourage banks to loan to poor families despite them being denied loans as a poor investment.

is a United States federal law designed to encourage commercial banks and savings associations to meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.[1][2][3]  Congress passed the Act in 1977 to reduce discriminatory credit practices against low-income neighborhoods, a practice known as redlining.[4][5]  The Act requires the appropriate federal financial supervisory agencies to encourage regulated financial institutions to meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered, consistent with safe and sound operation (Section 802.). To enforce the statute, federal regulatory agencies examine banking institutions for CRA compliance, and take this information into consideration when approving applications for new bank branches or for mergers or acquisitions (Section 804.).[6]

(ie: more regulation, not less... to encourage loans to poor investments...)

Maybe you read a different version of history?

Huh. Well, you've got a better source than I can come up with off the top of my head (I can't come up with any). Still, kuro_suna has a good point, in that it's about area discrimination rather than the income of those applying for the loans, specifically. And I still find it hard to believe that the situation was thrust upon banks, as there tended to be a LOT of television ads and suchlike for loans designed to be easy to qualify for with low starting interest rates, etc. At least around here, if I recall correctly. And those were exactly the sorts of loans that caused the whole mess.

[Aqizzar]

I don't know where this "banks were forced by the government to sell bad loans" bullcrap started but it's as much spindoctory now as it ever was.  Watch some interviews with actual economists and ex-regulators.  Read some of the door-stopper books they've written.

Put simply, the Federal Reserve rules on banking practices were rendered so toothless that some investment managers figured out they could inflate their company's bottom line by selling crap loans and mortgages, wrapping them into divisioned debt-bundles and derivative loans, and a bunch of other voodoo crap that can be better understood as a semi-legal form of money laundering.  Nobody knew enough about all these new smoke-and-mirror constructions to even question their value, much less what was backing them up.  And by "nobody" I mean other bankers, who were mostly selling these things to each other.  Hence why they all went down together, further fueled along by (what I consider a mind-blowing state of affairs) the allowance that corporations can take out insurance policies on things they don't own.  Like say, their competitor companies, so they have a payback incentive to burn the market to the ground, beyond just putting their rivals out of business.

But what happened was, since the early 1980s, all notion of bank regulation and oversight was completely gutted out of the government.  Investigation and clearance was contracted out to private observer agencies, whose official business model was to sell their "regulatory" services to the bank they watched, not the Federal Reserve.  In other words, it became a race to the bottom of which rating agency could offer the loosest interpretation of the rules, so no one who could do or say anything about these banking practices really even knew it was happening, and were too distracted by the awesome DOW Jones figures to care.

It was an entire industry founded on making up numbers and hiding bad assets, caused and created entirely by a lack of government oversight and regulation, at the behest of slavish worship of the free-market principle of swindling the fuck out of anyone you can and squirreling away your eight-figure bonuses in the Cayman Islands before the IRS comes calling.  Bernie Madoff was just one step beyond crooked compared to the rest of the banking industry, in that he didn't even have the pretense of an actual business.

[Andir]

there tended to be a LOT of television ads and suchlike for loans designed to be easy to qualify for with low starting interest rates, etc. At least around here, if I recall correctly. And those were exactly the sorts of loans that caused the whole mess.

I would actually chalk that up to a buyer beware situation.  Too many people expect everything to be happy and fair.  Nobody reads the fine print, nobody figures out the actual costs... they assume that the bank is doing what's best for the person taking out the loans when, in fact, the bank is looking to make money.  If you can't pay to meet the terms of the loan, legally you have no foot to stand on.  You signed into that.  Now, it sure didn't help that people were winning lawsuits and states were passing laws to prohibit the repossession of homes which made people more careless with the contract because they felt they had protection.

Aqizzar, I actually have an interesting video concerning that... it pretty much details the operation that was going on and it points square at the Reserve allowing banks to claim on losses... I'm looking for it right now.

[Aqizzar]

Oh don't get me wrong, I know the Federal Reserve had a lot of complicity in the bank meltdown.  Partly it was them trying to bail-out the rapidly quaking banks a couple years before the bubble burst, because they were already too big to fail and so forth.  Mostly it was because the Fed and so many related government functions are, and have been for decades, staffed and run by people who believe the government should never do anything to regulate business practices.  Which is exactly what to expect when you put people who used to run hedge-funds in charge of the agency that's supposed to regulate hedge-funds.  Why this keeps happening I cannot fathom.

As for people taking out bad loans in good faith, yeah, I'll agree that everybody should walk in assuming the bank is try to screw, as I assume most people do.  For that matter, no one should ever trust a loan with a variable interest rate.  But you can't just say "they should have read the fine print better".  Have you ever tried?  Firms hire armies of lawyers to crank out hundreds of pages of stupidly convoluted word constructions precisely so that no one who isn't a dozen-man team of business lawyers could ever read it.  My economics professor loved to bitch about it.  He held a PhD in business management, and bachelors in International economic theory and other crap I can't even remember.  When he took out a loan on his house, he tried to read the whole contract himself.  He got through three pages before he went dyslexic.

[Andir]

Then I'll stop looking for it... but in the regard of fine print, this is why you hire a lawyer to review this paperwork.  It'll actually deter people from buying loans because having a lawyer just adds to the expense of getting the loan, banks will have to conform and reduce this crap because they either continue selling bad loans (and yes, people get screwed) and the bank falls (which is good...) or they get back to GAPP and start doing business right.  Bailing them out is only perpetuating this charade.

[Aqizzar]

You expect the average person taking out a mortgage to have the money laying around to hire a lawyer to read it for them?  For a thorough reading of those sub-prime variable-interest scrolls, that could well run most of the value of the mortgage.

Let me just ask you straight up.  How much personal experience do you have in dealing with loans and banking?

Regarding the bail-out thing, I had plenty of my own ideas on what should have happened instead, because what did happen, throwing free money at the problem until it sounded like it went away, was the absolute worst thing the government could have done.  Which goes right back to the Federal Reserve being run by former tycoons from the very industry they're supposed to control.  And I don't understand how they manage to con president after president into allowing this crap.  Maybe they spent some of those free millions on a mind-control ray or something.

[Andir]

You expect the average person taking out a mortgage to have the money laying around to hire a lawyer to read it for them?  For a thorough reading of those sub-prime variable-interest scrolls, that could well run most of the value of the mortgage.

Let me just ask you straight up.  How much personal experience do you have in dealing with loans and banking?

That was my point... fewer loans would have been issued, banks need then to continue growth/conducting business, and if you need a lawyer to review your paperwork you limit the number of loans being issued.

And I'm going through a mortgage process right now actually.  With the housing market so low and not having any debt, I figure I can leverage some of my savings into a standing investment.  And yes, I have a lawyer already.