prediction: after the impending healthcare catastrophy in US, public healthcare will no longer be avoidable in your country. Since Trump doesn't seem to care about republican "values" as much as he does about staying in power, he will propose his own plan, obviously named "Trumpcare". Biden will propose some slow reforms that may or may not eventually lead to stopping people from dying because they cant afford a doctor, so Trump will simply say that his plan will be implemented immedietly (thus winning himself the elections).

To appease his core base, he will of course frame it in a vaguely racist/xenophobic way, making it all about "real Americans" who "deserve the right to healthcare". His initial plan will be completely ridiculous, but Democrats will have no choice but to work with him and make it workable. He will then graciously accept those corrections as a big concessions to them, and then take all the credit anyway. He will also claim that he was always pro public healthcare, just didn't want the Democrats to give it away to anyone coming into the country.

On the plus side, you might finally get public healthcare this way.

I can't believe I'm seeing someone post about the GFC who actually knows what they're talking about. I didn't think that was legal on the internet.

It's just a little sad to me that some people are simply unable to learn things that run counter to their feelings.

I'm not personally aware of a better source on the internet on this topic. Tanta (RIP) from Calculated Risk was one of the better sources from the perspective of explaining mechanically how things worked, but she passed away shortly after the Lehman collapse and she didn't quite have a holistic view of how this all fit in. I've not come across anyone that seems to understand at a detailed level how things worked.

Again, the point wasn't that nothing bad was ever done, because that's not realistically achievable in any large field for any period of time. There are always bad apples, there are always mistakes that in normal times don't matter but in the wrong set of circumstances can blow up badly. The point is that the typical political narrative where Wall Street unjustly and illegally enriched itself at the expense of Main Street is closer to the opposite of what happened. Whether Goldman made some mistakes in disclosing risks while selling securities to a Saudi fund, whether unrelated Goldman traders were internally chatting about how bad some of these securities were, whether some pension fund was able to recover some of their losses through finding legal loopholes, are ultimately irrelevant in terms of why and how things happened and who is culpable.

And fines and settlements only strengthen my point here - what's going on is that they were defrauded by borrowers and mortgage lenders, and they passed off some of those to their investors. They are, well, in some specific situations, being required to pay restitution for forwarding the risk to the investors that bought those securities, but they are not able to get paid for having been victims of the exact same thing on the other end. This is the legal equivalent of what happened with the balance sheet - Wall Street was quite literally stuck holding a lot of the risk themselves when things blew up. This all makes your central claim that Wall Street is getting away with something even more absurd. The general public distrust of the financier class, which on the left is motivated by the distrust of the rich and powerful and on the right is motivated by the distrust of others, including foreigners and urban elites, not to mention widespread antisemitism across the political spectrum, made Wall Street a great legal and political target.

Still waiting to hear who deserved to go to jail and didn't and your holistic analysis of who took whose money and who deserves the blame.

LOL

So you're pretending to be a 'facts' guy now ? That's rich. Keep it coming.

Tell me more about how nothing illegal occurred but when it did it didn't matter anyway. Because of those pesky loan holders who violently forced the poor helpless Wall Street financiers (some of the Semites I hear) to give them sub prime mortgages, even though the poor financiers were systematically overleveraged by virtue of their own financial vehicles.

You're an author right ?
Humorous fiction ?

https://www.propublica.org/article/h...-auction-block

I think we can be encouraged by the plateau in cases in NY, CA, WA. I think this mirrors Italy, Spain, Wuhan...three places where the outbreak took hold, but was "contained" at a certain level after strict social distancing measures were put in place.

It does concern me that the NE USA, areas with close ties to NYC, that is NYC, NJ, CN...seem to be showing a 10% death rate over the last few days. This is what UK, Italy, Spain, and France show...and this death rate stays pretty high, it seems. the cases are dropping in these countries, the curve is bending as they say, same as in NYC...but the deaths are high and stay high. At least that is my read of the data they give us.

So you wonder are we going to see something like this:
the cases in NE USA plateau, deaths stay high for weeks longer...then in other places in the USA, places behind NYC, are we going to see the same phenomena but to perhaps a lesser extent as the measure were put in place relatively early (before it "took hold" like in NYC, Wuhan, Italy) and seem to be working to some extent. Will Florida one day report their same 1000 cases but instead of 27 dead like today, they record 100 dead? and then 700 cases but 90 dead. and week after week...FL, TX, GA, etc etc. well, first things first, have these states really "plateaued"?

and of course the massive topic of how and when do we "reopen".

No need for pretense, when the facts are obvious. I've had a lot of lopsided arguments on this forum over the years and have educated quite a few people but your brand of ignorance is special too. Keep in mind, you stopped being an important part of my audience a few posts back.

Either way, this display of fact-free snark-fest by RFlush is a good microcosm of what's going on in this world today and why governments around the world had trouble reacting properly. In a world driven by political narratives, people judge facts and evidence entirely by how well they fit into the political narrative they hold dear. In that world, every wannabe pundit is an expert on everything because, well everything has a political angle - it's hard to interpret facts properly, but it's easy to decide which facts you want to be true and which interpretation you want to be true. It gets even easier when facts get delivered with political angles built in, so you don't even have to do this filtering - the media (social or otherwise) will do this for you. To some extent, this has always been how politics works at the electoral level, but what's a bit concerning is that a lot of areas that used to be domains of experts and bureaucrats that worked independently of political narratives are starting to become politicized.

This is a perfect backdrop for Trump - his aversion to facts is nearly an asset, he knows exactly what he wants to be true and he's been able to apply this more broadly than most. But we have to remember that this isn't purely a right-wing phenomenon, even though at the moment, at the federal level, it's more prominent there. It's not surprising to see that RFlush operates the exact same way, even if he's playing, possibly temporarily, a progressive. He knows that he's right because his political narrative demands that he be right. Unfortunately, the actual mechanics of the world don't care about your political narrative. Coronavirus doesn't give a damn whether you believe in it or not. What we say here doesn't matter in the small, but in aggregate, they do.

I know some people here are more involved in politics than I will ever be, so my ask is simple - use political narratives when you need to, since building compelling narratives around facts is critical for long-term electoral success. I wrote a bit on this earlier (it seems that a version of my hypothetical rhetoric actually became somewhat mainstream lately):

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/4...point-1245897/

But, if you want to have positive influence on the world, you can't lose yourself in the narrative and you need to be able to distinguish between the talking points used to sell candidates and policy and the more complex reality they underlie. You're the dealer, not the junkie. You still have to understand the world independent of the narrative you're using to rally the normal folks too caught up in the every day life to care about the nuances of the world as it relates to policy. The narrative isn't going to govern the country.

Sure and they were the major beneficiaries of the loans especially so with refis. But Countrywide et al and their stooge appraisers were complicit in the illicitness as well.

Forbes online is different from the magazine. The online side is just a clickbait content farm paying independents for stories.

Yeah it sure looks that way at the moment. Even SK who got a jump on this early on and consequently has a much lower number in their base in which to devote resources to contract trace and isolate can't quite seem to make it go away. Who knows what we're facing in the U.S. if it's that resilient but here's Italy since their lockdown:

Big thumbs up for white men out there working towards that herd immunity.

Of course, the focus on deal flow, shoddy underwriting, etc is all part of the story. Lots of mortgage brokers knowingly got their customers to lie, pushed appraisers to get to the right number and misrepresented the loan structure to many of the customers. These are all Main Street operations, the actual beneficiaries were local employees and contractors that were paid per deal and most of the independent lenders blew up on their own - Countrywide would have too if it stayed independent, as BAC lost far more money from Countrywide than Countrywide would've had available - so there wasn't much of a point in going after them.

In 2006 or so, I was literally told if I couldn't prove my income I could get what's called a "liar's loan" - at a higher rate of course. They weren't remotely trying to hide it.

more than USA info for sure

If the facts were obvious all experts would agree with you and you wouldn't be so defensive of your theory.

Are you comparing your technical knowledge of finance with mine and saying my ignorance is somehow special ? Ignorance is a lack of knowledge. It's not ever 'special'. It's binary. Finance is your field. So you have a more nuanced opinion of what happened but that doesn't mean you're right. That appeal to authority logical fallacy is always in play.

The thing is, we all make good decisions while being ignorant of technical details all the time. We're wired to do that so we can actually navigate and survive in the world.

Do you actually think you're teaching the forum something by using me as and example ? LOL Everyone knows the body politic is composed of all kinds of people and politicians must gain a following in an efficient way. Talking points are a way to do that. That doesn't mean they're bad, they need to be evaluated on their own merit. In this example, the talking point that people should have been jailed after the financial collapse is perfectly reasonable. You don't know that because you're a dick. But it really is.

I think your mother's voice, putting you down as a child, is still in your head and you're trying to soothe the pain.

Anyway, good luck Captain Obvious. Maybe you'll find a disciple somewhere else.

the odds of Trump holding a large political rally before July 1st? Knowing Trump my guess would be 40 percent

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...-tell-n1175291

WSJ editorial page has also peeled off Trump, it’s starting to happen.

Wall St Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Nah.

Pretty much all real experts agree with me. I'm not at all defensive - I just find situations where the commonly accepted narrative is the exact opposite of the reality quite fascinating. I also find pseudo-progressive people - those that are clearly driven by a regressive mindset, but yet aligned with a progressive cause - quite fascinating. In a sense, they make the world go around - the human population, as a whole, is more regressive than progressive, yet the world is able to progress. Yet, it's important that they do not become the dominant voice within the broader progressive movement. It's all quite interesting to me that you being a disaffected outsider is more or less what the society needs from you.

Your literalism aside, ignorance manifests itself in different ways - the way yours manifests itself is quite special.

Finance is not my field. Given the level of discourse you engage in here, you bringing up logical fallacies is quite interesting. Formal logic is close to my field of expertise btw.

I don't think your decision to hold incorrect theories about the GFC and write terrible posts about them on the internet is having any impact on your ability to navigate and survive in the world. Your theories are allowed to be untethered from reality because their correctness has no bearing on your life. I already covered this topic in detail during this exchange, though I'm not sure if you know what I'm referring to.

The level of incoherence in this paragraph is quite striking.

This is promising - why don't you elaborate on this further? Go on, what else is going in my head? Why am I picking on you?

I have more than enough.

I'll admit to being biased here, but I never understood the call for criminal prodecutions for the housing crisis. The Wall St folks who everybody wanted to get, were basically the furthest people in the whole cycle from the actual borderline/questionable behavior. It's easy to see why even SDNY, the most fame hungry AGs office in the country, didn't even bother to try.

Yeah, they weren’t shy about it. And sure there was plenty of outright fraud going on with them. But still, the primary beneficiaries with the fiasco were the homeowners themselves. Most of the Wall St. gains were basically prop bets resulting in other Wall St. losses.

As 1 of the superpowers in the world. when does Trump's lack of intelligence become a threat globally as opposed to just nationally. The only way we are getting out of the catastrophic next 9 months is for the cabinet to invoke the 25th amendment. Ohio R Gov Mike Dewine has been top 10 handling this crisis Trump should take notes from him.

He hasn't started a war so he is just basically screwing the USA over mainly.

No worries with Biden as it would be under 50 people

All the experts that work on Wall Street may agree. Sure.

Well, it takes a certain amount of luxury to be able to be a progressive.
Most people are literally just trying to survive from day to day. If they can find common ground and vote together in a democracy they can better themselves. But the elites (of which you seem to fancy yourself) will always pit them against one another. So they end up acting in what you might call a regressive manner. I don't think it can be helped. Survival always comes first. But people want to progress. So in the end they do, it's just slower than it should be.

Your vision of a elite progressive aristocracy is pretty regressive though.

Are you saying I'm a disaffected outsider of society or just the economy ?
Or do you mean from you little sewing circle. ?

Okay. As long as you're just calling names.


I'm pretty sure allowing guys like you(or the guys your making excuses for) to set the system up to fail again is going to impact me on some level. But okay, I'm not a decision maker, I just get one vote.

You're referring to your claim that if people are complaining the problem was solved. I laughed at you and you're still but hurt.


I figure you have to hash that out with your therapist. I wouldn't go near an intellectual if I could help it. You guys are so smart you outsmart yourselves.

I don't think you're picking on me. You're just mad because I laughed at you and you're not used to it. It's funny to me.