The Clinton Thread: All things Hillary

[thetaxmancometh]

Gemini, I am the same person but I decided that I would respond to attacks with attacks. I would prefer having a reasoned debate, thus far no one on this board is willing to do so.

I started off by showing respect to everyone and got constantly attacked. You, lois, MB, no one stood in my defense so I had to choose to respond in kind. You can defend the people you like, that is fine, but at least have the intellectual honesty to look at their actions and judge them by it.

You are correct, this is Lois's board and if she asks me to leave it, I will do so.

[Katiebee]

No one stood in my defense when you attacked me, no one stood in Lois' or Miss Barbara's defense either. Your arguments stand or fall upon your own devices. Right now you are simply alienating people with your unreasonable behavior.

[thetaxmancometh]

You all stand in each other's defense all the time! That is fine, but the problem is that you are also the ones starting the attacks all the time. The reason you get attacked, though you still havnt been able to admit it, is that you attack me first. If you attack me, I will respond. For a long time I didn't do so but that still didn't prevent or deter others from attacking me and none of you "reasonable" people told the unreasonables to address issues and not personal attacks, so I responded in kind. If you are able and willing to set those sorts of behavior aside, so am I.

[Katiebee]

And there you are wrong. You interpret an attack on your argument as an attack on you. If you are so thin skinned, you should not be here.

[Katiebee]

The repeal of glass-Steagall allowed the banks to bundle bad loans and seek the instruments. This encouraged the banks to make bad loans to sell as high value instruments. The Countrywide debacle was the spear tip, they made huge amounts of money doing that until their Ponzi scheme caught up with them. BOA made the final payment on that colossal error a few months ago.

The steady erosion of The Banking Act of 1932 and repeal of Glass-Steagall by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was the final enabling stroke that opened the gates.

Oh, and there is a massive difference between economics and finance. You have strayed from the one to the other. The Austrian School of Economics does not apply here.

[thetaxmancometh]

Katie, I showed several times the difference between an attack on my argument and an attack on me... no one addresses my argument, they all do personal attacks. If you are trying to say that from now on you will just attack my argument, I welcome the change!

[Lois]

So now you are trying to turn your question into a completely different question?

Not at all, you were just confused about my question, I believe intentionally. I asked in the first post "Who here actually likes Hillary?". When you were confused, I expressed what liking Hillary means... I.E. liking what she stands for. You seemed to interpret my first question as "Who here is or would like to be friends with Hillary?"... you started the strawman. Now, let's address your other points shall we?

Bullshit.

Your questions was:  Who here actually likes Hillary? 

If you really meant something else you should have said so in the OP.

Not saying what you mean is a form of dishonesty.  That is why I called you a douche.

[thetaxmancometh]

No, you used ad homs because you had nothing better to offer. My question was very clear, who likes Hillary.... you are the one who intentionally misunderstood it. If I asked you if you liked Obama or Trump then you would have had no problem answering it. Part of being an adult is taking responsibility for your actions.......

[Well Behaved Lady]

[Katiebee]

The Great Depression was caused by more than  a single cause.  It was world wide. However, the Fed was not a primary cause in any of that, and the Fed was notoriously circumspect in its interventions.

The Fed underwent a significant change in duties and powers as a result OF the Great Depression. It was not a cause. Indeed, the fiscal policies of the government before and during the Great Depression, UNTIL the Roosevelt administration were follow owing the Conservative fiscal policies, which were part of the causation and a reason why the depression in the U.S. lasted so long. It wasn't until a massive government spending program was instituted that the economy recovered. This was called the War Effort. WWII.  

[Katiebee]

I think you are misreading history. Britain had its colonies and a guaranteed market. France was tied with Britain. Germany used government spending for military expansion. As the military in Germany expanded both demand for products and available workforce was affected. WWII rationing and production of war materials did reduce standard of living for civilians. However, employment was at full levels, and income was increased for nearly all households. Demand drove production. This is not like the reverse model of the Soviets where they attempted to have production drive demand.

The kensyian model used by the Fed didn't go into full operation until WWII. The period of 1928-33 that you cite and the preceding administration were both Republican, which did NOT subscribe to kensyian theories, and their fiscal policies kept the Fed from acting.  Hoover was not Roosevelt. Roosevelt took office in 1934 and his economic policies attempted to end the depression.

[Katiebee]

The mortgage crisis was not caused by monetary policy by the Fed. The poster child of the mortgage crisis was Countrywide which was purchased in 2008 by Bank of America, who just recently finished paying anothe immense fine for Countrywide's practices.

Poor business decisions and practices, lack of due diligence, and simple fraudulent practices by lenders were the root cause of the mortgage crises, which precipitated a monetary withdrawal. Banks curtailed their lending practices because of the amount of bad debit they had incurred due to the subprime lending practices.

[thetaxmancometh]

Just as a note, the Keynesian model is still not in effect. The part of Keynes that is never implemented is the second half: using "boom times" to pay off government debts and absorb excessive private demand.

[Katiebee]

A 60 year bubble? No. I do not accept your analogy. It requires a supposition that good economic situations are bad, and that ethics are irrelevant.

[thetaxmancometh]

Something FA Hayek pointed point in his "Road to Serfdom". Booms create busts, simply said.

[Katiebee]

The mortgage crisis was not caused by an expansion of money supply. It was much simpler. Making loans to people who have no possibility of repaying them is a recipe for disaster. The Subprime market went wild with unethical practices. They then turned around and sold investment instruments with lots of these loans in them, fraudulently, and threat is what caused the crisis.

IF those mortgages were properly made to people able to make the payments, e.g. People whose ration of debt to income was not wildly upside down, the crisis would not have approached the level it did.

Reducing those fraudulent instruments did in Sachs-Goldman, destroyed Countrywide, and eliminated the reserve of all the big three banks and many smaller banks, which reduced theirs as well as the smaller institutions ability to cover normal business short term loans, which in turn drive a great many lay-offs, which looks a lot like a reduction of money supply. The money was there, but it had to be reserved to cover all of the underwater loans that the subprime lending created.

It wasn't an oversupply of money, but a relaxing of oversight and excess of greed.

[Fr8]

I'm not really a fan of her, but I'd rather have a candidate that I agree with 70% of the time versus 30%.

I'm voting for Bernie Sanders.

[Piper-Dreams]

She is average, but better than the jokes the right are putting up there. Plus I think the SC needs to shift more Liberal for awhile. With her winning that's a given.

[Katiebee]

Reply to Katie:

You still have not provided one example of a bubble that was not preceded by money supply intervention.

An argument can be made that Senator Obama's Affordable  Housing act loosened lending standards such that the bubble was channeled into housing; instead of, say Mining and resources.   

The bubble would have existed somewhere.

The fact that Obama was complicit in building so many houses that his act should be called the 'Boardable Housing Act' does not take away the point that the original cause was the expansion of the money supply.

19th Century
    Panic of 1819, a U.S. recession with bank failures; culmination of U.S.'s first boom-to-bust economic cycle
    Panic of 1837, a U.S. recession with bank failures, followed by a 5-year depression
    Panic of 1857, a U.S. recession with bank failures
 Long Depression (1873–1896)
        Panic of 1873, a US recession with bank failures, followed by a four-year depression
        Panic of 1884
        Panic of 1893, a US recession with bank failures
        Panic of 1896

20th century

    Panic of 1901, a U.S. economic recession that started a fight for financial control of the Northern Pacific Railway
    Panic of 1907, a U.S. economic recession with bank failures

All occurred prior to 1913 when the Federal Reserve was created. All occured while we were on a metal standard for currency, e.g. all U.S. currency was backed by gold, which meant that there was a finite amount of money in the system. None were really caused by money policy intervention. All were caused by poor fiscal discipline by investors and banks.

Additionally, the roots of the sub-prime mortgage crisis had nothing to with anything that Obama did, either as President or Senator. The beginning was in 1993. In 2004 "Following example of Countrywide Financial, the largest U.S. mortgage lender, many lenders adopt automated loan approvals that critics argued were not subjected to appropriate review and documentation according to good mortgage underwriting standards." (from a Wikipedia article)

That conjecture proved to be extremely true and accurate as the sub-prime market was saturated with loans that were not sustainable.

It's not so much money supply intervention as it is stupid greed, and poor due diligence.

[thetaxmancometh]

Katie meant to provide her link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banking_crises