Well, if we _really_ need more than one, Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian are objectively _bad_ role models, although not up there with Chris Brown. Lindsay is cautionary tale of stardom crashing, and Kim is an almost perfect list of the wrong way to become rich and famous. I understand parents saying they don't want their kids to grow up like either of them!
Presumably you could fill out the list with other famous men who have self-destructed or committed crimes, like Mel Gibson or OJ Simpson. (Although I'd really need a list of 'current role models for kids' to do that, as I suspect neither of those are on that list anyway.)
Or, heck, why are we limiting ourselves to media? There are a lot of _sports_ stars with really crappy behavior.
Why do _parents_ think Justin Beiber is a poor role model?
What _exactly_ has he done that is not role-modely? The worst I can ever google him doing is getting pissed off at paparazzi, swearing and giving them the finger, and speeding recklessly to get away from them.
That's it. That's apparently the worse things that Mr. Beiber has ever done. I say this as someone who literally couldn't identify a single thing he's ever sung, and suspect I wouldn't like his music, but really don't care enough to find out.
But for having done nothing, he's right up there as a 'bad role model' with Chris Brown, professional wife beater, Lindsay Lohan, professional druggie, Kim Kardashian, professional person-who-is-famous-for-being-famous-and-in-a-sex-tape, and...hey, wait. WTF did Miley Cyrus do?
Hating on child pop stars might be what all the cool kids are doing, but this is supposedly a survey of _parents_.
Kanye West hasn't actually done anything 'bad', either, but he's managed to publicly make an ass of himself several times, so I _somewhat_ understand that he could be considered a 'bad role model'.
But I do think that the “natural” and the “civilizational/societal” (to use clumsy words) are more or less constructs we adopt to help understand or explain the world, and that in some limited cases, we can usefully posit such a distinction.
Well, yes, we can posit such a distinction, but we're almost always entirely erring on the side of natural.
That's not to say there might not be _tendencies_ of men and women to be interested or not in certain things, or even be good at certain things. And of course there are biological differences with muscle mass and weighing risks of pregnancy and other stuff. But pretty much every single interaction between men and women, and the outcome of it, are created by society.
That said, the 'wall', as you put it, between men and women is not exactly like most forms of Othering. Men and women have always lived together, in mostly the same society, so 90% of Othering is gibberish.
The idea that women were 'lesser' had to be very carefully planted over a very long time, and it seems like it would be just as hard to undo...except that society doesn't really work like that. You have to slowly convince everyone that half the population is not important, especially when this requires the help of that half of the population.
Sexism isn't like racism, where you can teach people to dislike a small group of people. Or where you can convince people to dislike people in a country they've never been to. That actually is pretty easy. But women are _right there_. Everyone knows them. Plus, the _women_ will object.
It is, to use a dumb analogy, slowly boiling a frog....you have to make sure no one notices. And, just as importantly, you have to use a few threats of force over the years to convince the women who aren't going along with it.
But _fixing_ the problem?
Our civilization, all civilizations, have one overriding meme, without which they are not actually civilization. It is that empathy is extended to everyone, even people we don't know. This meme is required for us to live in cities of more than 200 or so people, it is the entire basis of society. (So if you really want to call something 'natural', I guess this would be it. There's a reason that every religion has some form of the golden rule.)
And once you erase the Othering, once you get people see those people _as_ people, prejudice rapidly dissolves.
As someone who loves the Nook eInk devices, I find this sad. They were very nice, and so easy to root into a normal Android device it was trivial.
I'm planning to pick up a spare or two if they really go under and discount the prices.
If I have to switch to some other ereader I'll be annoyed. The low-end eInk Kindles don't have a touch screen, and aren't running Android anyway. (And don't have an microSD slot, but that is a minor problem overshadowed by the first two.)
I said this in some other post here, so let me repeat it here:
People are not human beings. Or, rather, there is an animal species called Homo Sapiens Sapiens that hypothetically exists and has some form of behavior that we know nothing about.
We are not them. What we are is civilized _people_. Modern, Western civilized people. Almost every single thing we do, everything we think we know about ourselves socially and psychologically, is due to what society has taught us. (And don't think I'm trying to make some sort of argument that other societies are not that way. All societies are that way. There are no 'natural' humans. I'm just specifically talking about modern western people in this post. I don't know anything about how some native Amazon tribe behaves.)
I suspect you agree, I was just trying to reframe the issue. Talking about about tearing down the wall wouldn't really result in a natural states...because there is not functionally such a thing for humans. We don't have a misapplied social layer over some sort of natural equality...we can no more strip away socialization than we can strip away the floor of a space station.
What we have to do is _build something different_. Something where we see the genders as essentially the same. In the end, we certainly won't get there 100% in any foreseeable amount of time, but we don't really need 100%.
It will be slow, even slower than fighting racism. Because racism was rarely tangled up in sex, which is a very important aspect of people. (And when it _did_ tangle up in sex, you'll notice that part took the longest to fix. Many people were uncomfortable with interracial relationships long after they were 'not racist' in most other ways.)
The irony here is that, while men have often been trained to have no respect for women, seeing them solely as sexual objects to be won, a good portion of what our culture has built out WRT sex has resulted in women being less willing to have sex, for various reasons. In fact, those two things reinforce each other. Men are being trained to behave in ironically self-defeating ways.
The important thing is that bigotry hurts _everyone_. It hurts the people being discriminated against, and that causes blowback that hurts, to varying degrees, the 'type' of people who are discriminating (Even the ones who have not done so.) This blowback can be small if the discriminated group is powerless and small and rarely interact with the discriminators, but, uh, that doesn't describe women.
Men should be trying to fix things as much as women. Even without moral considerations, it hurts us. (Not as much as them, but it does hurt.) Women walk around, for example, viewing us all as potential rapists...because a fairly damn high percentage of us are. Or, at a lesser scale, being viewed as some sort of asshole who will lie to get her in bed and then tell everyone how clever I am. There is almost _no trust_ given to men by women, for completely logical reasons.
I don't _like_ the men who have forced women to think that way about me.
No one has ever asserted that any form of marriage is 'discriminatory'.
Apparently, in Jindal's universe, 'traditional marriage' is not 'marriage', at all, it's a law barring gay people from getting married.
You know, all those complaints about the left redefining marriage, and then the right goes and actually _literally_ redefines the word to stop meaning 'A couple joined together'. And instead the word 'marriage' now means 'A law stopping marriage'. (Of which the traditional form is, presumably, barring gays.)
'So, I heard you got married over the summer.'
'Yup, I passed legislation barring gay people from marriage.'
'Well, I also got married this summer, but it wasn't a traditional marriage. Instead of barring gays from marriage, we barred molemen!'
What do people do on their honeymoon...pass laws about driver's licenses?
Hey, wait a second...if 'marriage' means 'barring people from marriage', then wouldn't all that those laws about marriages (By which I mean 'marriage') laws accomplish is...control who can pass laws? I'm so very confused.
That said, since they installed their guy in power, the left has been pretty cavalier about the costs of servicing an ever-increasing national debt.
This is just a blatant, bald-faced lie.
Under Obama, the deficit has reduced at the fast rate ever since WWII, dropping like a rock. (And notice I'm not even talking about the sequester.) It's not balanced yet, but that's mostly because Republicans refuse to talk about tax rates. And, of course, we're in a damn recession.
Now, the debt does continue to grow, and it will continue to grow as long as we spend as much money as we're spending (Which _both_ parties agree on and the right has no problem with when it's their guy in power.) and as long as we collect as little in taxes (Which is almost entirely due to Republicans.). Pretending this is the fault of the Democrats is just blatantly lying to everyone.
Look, we're not stupid here. We _know_ the deficit grows hugely under Republicans, and tapers off under Democrats. We _knows this_. It is an actual fact.
That sort of lie might play in public, but no one is falling for it here.
One of the more infuriating things about the whole debate was the lack of a Reublican or conservative alternative.
But the _most_ infuriating thing about the whole debate was that we did have a Republican alternative. It was just being pushed by the Democrats.
In a universe where Fox and Koch brothers didn't stab the Republicans in the back with the Tea Party and death panels and other such bullshit immediately after Obama's election, the Republicans could have stood there and claimed the Democrats had finally come around to_their_ proposal from back in 1992.
Instead, the Republicans shifted into reverse so fast they ripped out their transmission, and have been stuck coasting backwards ever since.
Republicans are popular in the press only when they’re Republican-bashing. Jindal’s “stupid” comment was carried far and wide. But when he lays out Republican principles, he’s suddenly gone off the reservation.
I like how you're implying there's something wrong with that.
The actual fact is, people who are not the Republican Base are tired of the Republicans pandering to that base with complete nonsense. Even other Republicans are tired of it.
Thus they enjoy people calling them out on it, especially other Republicans, which raises hope the Republican party is not entirely made of morons.
They don't care a flying fuck when yet another Republican says a bunch of completely idiotic stuff. Why, it's almost as if that has become _expected_!(1)
But, go ahead, pretend that this situation somehow is the _slightly_ bit confusing, that you can't understand how a group of nonsense-speaking loons that everyone is tired of only get press when they do something that shows the slightest bit of self-awareness that they _might_ understand how crazy they sound. And they get no press when they're rambling complete gibberish like Jindal has started doing.
1) Holy fuck...wait a second. Are you saying that Jindal's long rambling nonsense _are_ Republican principles? I thought you were a Republican? You actually want the press to _cover_ his statements? Seriously?
You did notice how no one here seems to think his statements were a good thing, right?
I think, at this point, separating out nature vs. nurture WRT to sex is nearly impossible, and hell, even if men do, in some sort of hypothetical imaginary state of nature, push more for sex...there's nothing to say that they can't be socialized the other way, or women socialized to like it more.
Trying to figure out what the human sex drive looks without _any_ sort of culture is nearly impossible, because humans don't even look like _people_ without culture. Trying to argue what people are _without_ socialization is nearly complete nonsense. 'People' are almost entirely memes at this point, a collection of beliefs and behaviors that we pass around.
Men generally, right now, are pushing for sex more than women, and we can _certainly_ change that with socialization (In either direction, in fact.), considering basically all human interaction is due to socialization. Many men also seem to have rather poor notions of women's sovereignty over her own body, and we can certainly change that with socialization also.
It doesn't _particularly_ matter where the 'original cause' is., or if we're ever able to trace it. It would be rather unethical to let people grow up outside society, and while I'm aware that's happened before, I don't think that a _group_ of people have ever done that and anyone observed their sexual norms.
The point I was making was just that if men really are _predisposed_ to something, that it makes more sense to have _harsher_ rules about it, and pay more attention to it, not shrug it off.
But Taranto has apparently confused 'natural inclination' for 'something we should let happen'. Whether or not it _is_ a natural inclination or not, it's certainly something we should decide to not let happen!
And raping people probably, technically, _is_ a natural inclination, just like hitting them on the head and stealing their stuff is. We don't naturally have empathy to people we don't really know, and we don't naturally respect them or their stuff, and will just take it if we can and they can't fight us off. However, here in _civilization_, we are civilized otherwise...except that, WRT rape, men often _aren't_. Aka, rape culture.
And, if women really _do_ want sex as much as men, we have _very clear_ evidence that it is possible to socialize people who want sex into committing rape very rarely. Because we did exactly that with women.
There's not actually any logical way to look at this and conclude what Taranto did. WTF is this nonsense about limiting 'male sexuality'...if male sexuality is _rape_, then hell yes we want to limit it. If men are actually pre-programmed rape machines that can't be changed...then a) stop dis-believing accounts of rape, and b) actually set up a power structure to punish them for that.
Taranto is passing bullshit of the highest order, because he frankly doesn't see rape as a big deal.
I suspect that sexual _forwardness_ might in fact be an inextricable part of 'male sexuality'. Or whatever you want to call it. I suspect that men will always 'push' more for sex, due to biology. Even far in the future, in some hypothetical universe where sexism is completely gone, men will be the gender most likely to make sexual advances, because men simply want sex more than women. This is not to imply that this is anything more than a _statistic_, and plenty of women want sex more than men.
I am aware that this is probably not entirely 'political correct' in feminism. (And I really hate using the phrase 'political correct' in quotes that way, because most people who do are assholes.) But there are actual hormonal and physiological differences between men and women that could account for this. (And I could be entirely wrong, and this could all be completely socialized, in which case this is all nonsense.)
OTOH, thinking of this drive as 'aggressiveness' is probably exactly the wrong way to think of it. There's absolutely no reason that 'forwardness' and 'attacking women' need to be the same thing.
How men push for sex, and whether or not they _stop_ when rejected, and how they treat any potential partner, _are_ entirely due to socialization, and we know that for a fact, due to different cultures having different rules throughout history.
Hell, if anything, this idea means that men need to be _more careful_ and have _more rules_ about sexual conduct so their desire for it does not lead into wrongness, and have actual punishments to deter them.
There are only really three choices here:
1) You believe in the difference between how men and women treat sex is entirely social.
2) You believe that there are real differences, that men are much more likely to press forward, while women don't, and thus...
a) ...you believe men need _strict_ rules to stop them from doing so against a women's wishes, along with very specific socialization when young, and that we need to speak out against misogynistic othering of women and all the bullshit of that sort. And we need to root out institutional cultures of rape everywhere they can be found.
b) ...you think men will just rape women, and, hey, that sucks, but what are you going to do? It's not like it's legal or something, we _try_ to stop it, sometimes. A little.
Democracy is merely a method, not one that necessarily pursues good ends.
I think the best way to say it is that democracy is the best way we've come up with of giving the population what they want.
The problem is, sometimes the population are complete idiots.
Which is why we have a few constitutional failsafes to make sure it doesn't get too far out of whack, although ultimately the population itself must change. (Otherwise they'd end up changing the constitution.)
Also, this I think paragraph deserves a special 'Huh?'
It won’t sit in banks. They’ll invest in short-term highly liquid investments like T-Bills, money market funds, commercial paper or repos
Firstly, commercial paper _is_ a loan. You just asserted that money won't be in banks for them to make a commercial mortgage from...because the money will, instead, already have been loaned out to corporations! Oh noes! Corporations won't be able to get loans because all the money will have been given to corporations in the form of loans!
Yes, it's not the _same_ sort of loan, but duh, it's still money in their pocket, and will function just fine keeping the economy moving. (And, of course, corporations tend to keep money in _banks_, so, hey, it's also there, and can be loaned out again.)
Secondly, the weird thing about T-Bills is that, uh, there's a fixed amount of them. The government isn't issuing them for fun, they are issuing them to cover their deficit. Investors can't put 'more money' in T-Bills, all they can do is bid interest rates down.
Thirdly, saying they'll put the money in 'repos' is just saying they'll put the money in the existing securities market in complicated ways. In case you've forgotten, the _other_ side of that market _also_ exists, and once _they_ got the money, _they'd_ put it in the bank.
I swear, it's like everyone else here has this amazingly detailed knowledge of how securities work...and no idea of how the system _used_ to work, without securities. Where money was put in a bank by various people and loaned out by the bank against collateral.
How about the investors themselves? Why do you presume that investors that deal with this asset class day in and day out would be better off investing in whole loans when they prefer to invest in mortgage backed securities for the reasons I mentioned?
I GIVE EXACTLY NO FUCKS ABOUT INVESTORS.
I don't quite know how to explain this to you in any simpler terms.
Investors do not have some magical right to have a certain market exist.
Also, if the criticism of mortgage-backed securities is that the sellers of the paper didn’t care about the loans because they weren’t bearing the risk, then how does whole loans mitigate that issue when someone selling a whole loan is also not the person bearing the risk? This is important.
The risk is migrated because there is a lot _less_ selling.
When you do _less_ of something, it is _by definition_ less dangerous.
It’s not up to you to decide that.
*checks his wallet* A voter registration card. Hrm.
*checks the constitution* Regulate interstate commerce. Hrm.
I guess it _is_ up to me, along with every other voter, to decide which securities can legally be sold in this country.
It is this kind of folk economics that leads me to believe that you have no understanding of these markets. Investors in mortgage-backed securities, especially AAA, AA or A-rated securities are not gambling. If you’ve ever dealt with investment officers at pension funds, they aren’t the gambling type (making bad investments does not constitute gambling btw).
Just defining something as 'not gambling' does not, in fact, make it not be gambling.
They are buying what they believe are safe investments based on the risk. This is always how the MBS markets functioned. Even when the toxic sludge got the AAA ratings, investors bought them on the premise they were safe. How is that gambling? They may have been victims of fraud.
And, of course, it would be crazy for the government to do something to make it harder to sell fraudulent products, or even outlaw certain types of things all together.
No if you'll excuse me, I have to go drink my daily snake oil to cure my cough before I restart my perpetual motion machine that seems a little flakey.
The real fear back then was that the lack of access to the conduit lenders as a vehicle for refinancing would trigger a mass of loan defaults if only because borrowers were not able to refinance loans. I don’t remember the exact number off the top of my head but CMBS had maybe 33% or more of the total commercial mortgage market. The other lenders in the market could have picked up a little bit of this slack but not all of it. The fear was a mass selloff. It never materialized because loan servicers began to play the extend-and-pretend game and just let borrowers continue to make payments (a strategy that was quite helpful actually).
So you're standing there and _pointing out_ that mortgage securities only had _a third_ of the commercial mortgage market to start with, yet, you are predict ABSOLUTE CALAMITY if that third goes away. Because there's no other way that last _third_ could exist. I mean, it's not like two-thirds of the market wasn't entirely fine with holding their mortgages without sticking them in securities.
*holds hand to earth* Oh, I'm being told they _were_ fine with doing that.
In your scenario, a lot of investors would take losses since they would no longer be able to refinance. Those investors have companies. Those companies have employees. Those employees can end up losing jobs as the firms take massive losses. If those firms are, say, private equity, then their investors (pension funds among others) take a huge hit on their equity/alternative investment allocations.
...because investment firms, if they can't continue to invest in a certain specific type of investment, just close their doors and fire everyone.
You know, I don't actually care about investors, so _technically_ I shouldn't care if this was going to happen...but it's a completely idiotic premise anyway.
On the residential side, I don’t see much difference between your scenario and 2006 and 2007 when the residential mortgage-backed securities market fell apart. It led to a drop in property values and massive foreclosures as borrowers couldn’t refinance loans and/or not afford to make payments.
...my 'scenario'? I don't think I proposed _any_ way to do what I was saying (I gave a hypothetical of banks having to keep 90% of loans, but then I clearly stated that was not a very good idea for other reasons), nor any time frame.
Now, to come up with some way that my idea is bad, you've decided randomly I was talking about doing it _all at once_. Which _obviously_ would cause a huge shock to all all sorts of things.
Of course, I haven't any point suggested doing things that way. Obviously, phasing out a market would take a rather long time.
On the residential side, I don’t see much difference between your scenario and 2006 and 2007 when the residential mortgage-backed securities market fell apart. It led to a drop in property values and massive foreclosures as borrowers couldn’t refinance loans and/or not afford to make payments.
Really? You don't see a difference between my plan and a _short-term disruption of the market_? Did you really just say 'If we got rid of mortgage backed securities all at once, we'd have to suffer through a few years of slowed growth, and then everything would be fine'?
Well, yes. I _entirely_ agree with that premise. The _only_ bad effect of removing that market would, indeed, be temporarily slowed growth.
Moreover, if we do it _slowly_, phasing in rules that make it more and more difficult to make mortgage-backed securities over a decade or so, and slowly let the existing market expire, we won't even have to suffer through slowed growth.
It moves to the sidelines
Where investors would keep their money, because they're all stupid or something.
It won’t sit in banks. They’ll invest in short-term highly liquid investments like T-Bills, money market funds, commercial paper or repos. Even if it sat in banks, who says the banks will increase lending? You’re making as many assumptions about your point of view as I am mine.
Um, banks would _have_ to increase lending if they actually wished to make money. Because that is how banks _normally_ make money. At minimum, they need to make loans to cover the interest they're paying on deposits.
Are you actually asserting that banks have decided to not actually do their job? That they are now somehow fundamentally incapable of turning their deposits into loans, and taking a cut of the difference interest rates? (You know, how _banks_ work?) That no one would step in and _start_ doing that if the banks refused?
Did you earlier accuse _me_ of not understand the markets? Do you actually understand what a _bank_ is, or is that just some strange word for 'investment house' in your dictionary?
I get the claim that trading on an actual exchange would stop the collapse that happened because no one could actually cover their positions. (Although, frankly, I had forgotten that is what actually _caused_ the collapse.)
What I don't get is what this has to do with ratings or what it was to do with your first sentence, or how it would help with the _other_ problem, specifically, everyone was actually lying about the _contents_ of the securities, and the loans were all overrated, and no one was actually bothering to create the securities correctly. That is the 'rating' problem that I thought we were talking about.
Not letting the entire damn markets assume insane positions would, indeed, be helped by an actual exchange, but that doesn't really seem to fix the fact it was a market in trading crap and lies to start with.
Is the idea that the exchange itself would regulate what was on the market? Why would it do that?
'Why the hell do we have to wear stilts all the time?'
'It keeps our shoes from getting muddy. We need to keep from being muddy.'
'...you were here five minutes ago when the stilts caused us to fall over and faceplant into the mud, totally ruining our entire set of clothes, right?'
Dave contends, with commendable insight, the ratings agencies are at the root of the problem.
Erm, not really. Yes, they gave absurd ratings to crap, but that was just because they were paid to do so. They weren't the 'root', they were just a participant.
But how would anyone rate these critters effectively? In a pool of a thousand mortgages, how could anyone know what’s going on?
If we can't trust third-party ratings agencies (And we clearly cannot trust them.), and we obviously wouldn't be so insane as to start trusting the _banks_ to rate themselves...then what?
This article is because I ask the question 'Why do we need a mortgage-backed security market in the first place?'
Well, here is a related question: Please explain how a mortgage-based security market is supposed to work when it is patently obviously that everyone involved in it is willing to blatantly and continually lie?
It really won't be that hard to set up a fake situation where it was legal to shoot someone that people can't _disprove_. (Slip a valuable necklace of yours in their bag in public, shoot them dead when they refuse to search their own stuff and try to leave.)
But for maximum fun, the trick is setting up an situation where you can shoot them dead and are legally correct even if _all_ the facts are known.
Since apparently _illegal_ transaction are required to be fulfilled or you can shoot the person (?!) there's an obvious one to get politicians:
1) Give one of them a campaign contribution.
2) Suggest that they vote a certain way on the law that they're not going to vote.
3) After they fail to vote that way, assert that they didn't provide the service you were expecting, and demand a refund of your vote buying. (Bring a film crew when you do this.) They will of course assert that you did _not_ purchase their vote, and will almost certainly refuse to return your contribution, as that would make them look guilty of having sold their vote.
4) Shoot them. Sorry, I mean shoot _towards_ them.
No, I wasn't complaining that we didn't solve problems before they happen...almost no one manages to do that, even if a few people do see the problem. The amount of countries that have said 'Hey, wait, if we let this keep happening we could have a problem in a decade.' is almost nil. I wasn't taking issue with that. :)
But we do seem to the be the only country unwilling to solve them _after_ they happen, though, under some odd theory that we're 'too close' to the problem to effectively see it or 'too emotional'.
So we ignore it long enough that it wraps back around to being a problem that 'doesn't happen', so no one can fix it then either. We are in danger of doing it with the financial industry.
It's a really stupid pattern with us. I dunno, perhaps it happens in other countries too.
Indeed. People who argue the problem is solved are fools. It _might_ be solved with mortgages, or might not. But if it is solved there, it will just pop up elsewhere. The finance industry are goddamn lunatics playing with other people's money.
Part of the problem, of course, is that they generate a lot of the money that exists. So they're all desperately trying to generate it _in their pocket_.
Normal human beings, us mere mortals, need a system that is safe, period. All normal transactions with banks should be in a bubble that is _actually safe_.
You know what, my earlier question about why we need mortgage-backed securities didn't go far enough? Why do we even need _private banks_?
Or, rather, why shouldn't we have a public bank that is actually just the US Treasury? It could hold our money and pay interest on it, it could (In fact, used to) issue student loans, it could even give mortgages to people. It could handle the banking needs of 90% of the population.
(Just watch, someone is about to explain to me how private banks work, completely ignoring my question of why we can't have a public one.)
The actual point of the CMBS marketplace is to provide a vehicle for the trading of an asset that generates a predictable cash flow. Lots of things like cash flows. Pension funds, for one example, were big buyers of MBS. They need to do something with the cash coming in off of people’s paychecks. Assets with predictable cash flows serve as a great vehicle for generating the income streams necessary to pay off current pension obligations.
*facepalm*
I guess I need to be more specific in my questions. I just asked for a reason for the market to exist, and that is, in fact, technically 'a' reason.
I shall rephrase: Does anyone have a GOOD reason to for the mortgage-based securities market to exist. Something it actually _does_, not something it failed horrifically at and destroyed everyone's pensions?
We could, in theory, turn banking back about 60 years and prohibit banks from (a) selling any loans that they originate and (b) hedging any risk that they carry. Many people believe that such an act would constitute slicing off your head to spite your face; the resulting reduction in liquidity would cause a massive collapse in global investment.
Yes, destroying the mortgage-based security market would, indeed, cause a massive collapse in global investment, or at least a massive collapse in global investment in mortgage-based security. That's sorta implied in the premise _of_ destroying the market.
My question is: Why the fuck should _any_ of us care about the mortgage-based security market?
It is important. When you sell your house, who writes you a check? Whose money backs that check? That’s ultimately investor money, not the bank’s money.
And it _used_ to be depositor money, and that system worked _perfectly well_.
We live in a world where fractional reserve banking keeps capitalism afloat.
Erm, the old system I'm talking about, before banks decided to invent this nonsense, is also 'fractional reserve'. $100 is _deposited_ in a bank, and $200 is loaned out.
Now, banks use 'investors', and depositors are completely SOL. Which is another reason this idiotic system needs to be justified....now no one gets interest anymore, because banks have enough money _without_ deposits.
And you're about to assert the economy is so much bigger now, so that deposits can't provide enough.
To that I say, firstly, 'Huh?', because money not invested in securities is invested in stocks, so is still in the economy, or deposited in banks to gain interest...which means it will be loaned out. The lack of a type of investment doesn't mean money gets put in mattresses.
Secondly, I point out, the amount of _printed_ money is not some fixed invariant number. We don't have to wave a magical mortgaged-base security wand to create enough. If less money is created via fractional reserve without securities than with it, and we want the later amount, we can just _print more_.
Look, the idea that you can kill people who refuse to provide a service to your satisfaction and don't provide a refund, under an idiotic law about 'theft', sounds like a badly designed law, so, you know, benefit of the doubt.
But the idea you can _shoot at someone's car and kill them_, and not be charged with fucking murder, is not any sort of law at all.
Texas: The state where it's apparently legal to fire your gun randomly as long as you assert later you didn't intend to kill anyone.
What the prostitute _should_ have done is felt threatened. I mean, it's not like _she_ knows where he was shooting. Then she could have Stood Her Ground and shot him. Actually, I'm kidding...she really could have legally shot him in _any_ state, under general self-defense. He was shooting at her while she was trying to flee! Even the most restrictive self-defense laws would allow responding to gunfire in kind.
Whenever the law says that two people have the right to kill each other in the same specific circumstances, the law is completely and utterly stupid.
I really wish some 'malicious' people would wander from state to state with these sort of idiotic laws that allow you shoot people with without consequences, and maneuver these moronic _lawmakers_ into such situations, and shoot them. Maybe not kill them, but shoot them real good.
The markets are very useful. I’ve laid out reasons why I think they are.
No, you haven't.
You've explained why people need to be able to slice up loans if they want to invest in the market, and why grouping a bunch of loans together allows diversification of risk. (Although I actually have objections to the second. Nothing is stopping investors from just investing individually in a bunch of mortgages, there's no reason we need to make an actual security out of the group. But that's not important right now.)
You have failed to explain the _actual point_ of the market in the first place.
I understand and mostly agree how things need to be if we wish to have a market in mortgage investment.
But I ask '…and those reasons are?' and you respond with 'If I am an investor and I have an allocation to make towards commercial real estate loans...'
That is not a 'reason'. That is an assumption that such a market should exist to start with.
Please state what you think would actually happen if, for example (And this is just an example and I think it would be overkill and in no way actually suggest it) we required banks to keep 90% of the mortgages they issued and it was illegal to sell securities or derivatives of those, or get insurance on them. Please explain it in terms of what would actually happen to the economy or to normal humans beings, not the people who are currently gambling in the casino, who we all _know_ would have to go elsewhere.
The only claim I've heard is that capital would dry up. Which seems reasonable to some extent, except, wait. Investor money doesn't just disappear. Logically, it would be invested in something else and continue to exist. Perhaps in the corporations themselves so they didn't have to get such large loans, or perhaps people would just invest in the banks. Otherwise, the money would just...uh...sit in banks, so it _would_ be available for issuing loans. Hrm, interesting.
The problem is that there are various industries entirely held by unions.
The entire entertainment industry, for example. Shipping, for another.
And once you get rid of the laws barring sympathetic strikes...
Or laws that allow unions to be punished for what union members do... (Imagine that outgoing shipment gets blocked by a single striking worker, who is then arrested. One at a time. And the union can't be held liable for this.)
Or laws that require unions to have a certain _portion_ of workers. What if the dozen repairmen in a factory of three hundred decided that _they_ were going to strike?
I'm not entirely convinced most workers would end up worse off without union law, is all I'm saying. I'm not saying I actually _want_ that removed, I just think the reality of 'no laws about unions' would be rather different than most people _proposing_ that think, because they have appear to have literally no idea that labor laws actually restrict unions in a lot of ways.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Survey Says? BZZZZZZZ!”
Well, if we _really_ need more than one, Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian are objectively _bad_ role models, although not up there with Chris Brown. Lindsay is cautionary tale of stardom crashing, and Kim is an almost perfect list of the wrong way to become rich and famous. I understand parents saying they don't want their kids to grow up like either of them!
Presumably you could fill out the list with other famous men who have self-destructed or committed crimes, like Mel Gibson or OJ Simpson. (Although I'd really need a list of 'current role models for kids' to do that, as I suspect neither of those are on that list anyway.)
Or, heck, why are we limiting ourselves to media? There are a lot of _sports_ stars with really crappy behavior.
"
Can we talk about the other elephant in the room?
Why do _parents_ think Justin Beiber is a poor role model?
What _exactly_ has he done that is not role-modely? The worst I can ever google him doing is getting pissed off at paparazzi, swearing and giving them the finger, and speeding recklessly to get away from them.
That's it. That's apparently the worse things that Mr. Beiber has ever done. I say this as someone who literally couldn't identify a single thing he's ever sung, and suspect I wouldn't like his music, but really don't care enough to find out.
But for having done nothing, he's right up there as a 'bad role model' with Chris Brown, professional wife beater, Lindsay Lohan, professional druggie, Kim Kardashian, professional person-who-is-famous-for-being-famous-and-in-a-sex-tape, and...hey, wait. WTF did Miley Cyrus do?
Hating on child pop stars might be what all the cool kids are doing, but this is supposedly a survey of _parents_.
Kanye West hasn't actually done anything 'bad', either, but he's managed to publicly make an ass of himself several times, so I _somewhat_ understand that he could be considered a 'bad role model'.
On “The Myth of a Man”
But I do think that the “natural” and the “civilizational/societal” (to use clumsy words) are more or less constructs we adopt to help understand or explain the world, and that in some limited cases, we can usefully posit such a distinction.
Well, yes, we can posit such a distinction, but we're almost always entirely erring on the side of natural.
That's not to say there might not be _tendencies_ of men and women to be interested or not in certain things, or even be good at certain things. And of course there are biological differences with muscle mass and weighing risks of pregnancy and other stuff. But pretty much every single interaction between men and women, and the outcome of it, are created by society.
That said, the 'wall', as you put it, between men and women is not exactly like most forms of Othering. Men and women have always lived together, in mostly the same society, so 90% of Othering is gibberish.
The idea that women were 'lesser' had to be very carefully planted over a very long time, and it seems like it would be just as hard to undo...except that society doesn't really work like that. You have to slowly convince everyone that half the population is not important, especially when this requires the help of that half of the population.
Sexism isn't like racism, where you can teach people to dislike a small group of people. Or where you can convince people to dislike people in a country they've never been to. That actually is pretty easy. But women are _right there_. Everyone knows them. Plus, the _women_ will object.
It is, to use a dumb analogy, slowly boiling a frog....you have to make sure no one notices. And, just as importantly, you have to use a few threats of force over the years to convince the women who aren't going along with it.
But _fixing_ the problem?
Our civilization, all civilizations, have one overriding meme, without which they are not actually civilization. It is that empathy is extended to everyone, even people we don't know. This meme is required for us to live in cities of more than 200 or so people, it is the entire basis of society. (So if you really want to call something 'natural', I guess this would be it. There's a reason that every religion has some form of the golden rule.)
And once you erase the Othering, once you get people see those people _as_ people, prejudice rapidly dissolves.
On “Driving Blind: All Your Gigs Are Belong to Us”
As someone who loves the Nook eInk devices, I find this sad. They were very nice, and so easy to root into a normal Android device it was trivial.
I'm planning to pick up a spare or two if they really go under and discount the prices.
If I have to switch to some other ereader I'll be annoyed. The low-end eInk Kindles don't have a touch screen, and aren't running Android anyway. (And don't have an microSD slot, but that is a minor problem overshadowed by the first two.)
On “The Myth of a Man”
I said this in some other post here, so let me repeat it here:
People are not human beings. Or, rather, there is an animal species called Homo Sapiens Sapiens that hypothetically exists and has some form of behavior that we know nothing about.
We are not them. What we are is civilized _people_. Modern, Western civilized people. Almost every single thing we do, everything we think we know about ourselves socially and psychologically, is due to what society has taught us. (And don't think I'm trying to make some sort of argument that other societies are not that way. All societies are that way. There are no 'natural' humans. I'm just specifically talking about modern western people in this post. I don't know anything about how some native Amazon tribe behaves.)
I suspect you agree, I was just trying to reframe the issue. Talking about about tearing down the wall wouldn't really result in a natural states...because there is not functionally such a thing for humans. We don't have a misapplied social layer over some sort of natural equality...we can no more strip away socialization than we can strip away the floor of a space station.
What we have to do is _build something different_. Something where we see the genders as essentially the same. In the end, we certainly won't get there 100% in any foreseeable amount of time, but we don't really need 100%.
It will be slow, even slower than fighting racism. Because racism was rarely tangled up in sex, which is a very important aspect of people. (And when it _did_ tangle up in sex, you'll notice that part took the longest to fix. Many people were uncomfortable with interracial relationships long after they were 'not racist' in most other ways.)
The irony here is that, while men have often been trained to have no respect for women, seeing them solely as sexual objects to be won, a good portion of what our culture has built out WRT sex has resulted in women being less willing to have sex, for various reasons. In fact, those two things reinforce each other. Men are being trained to behave in ironically self-defeating ways.
The important thing is that bigotry hurts _everyone_. It hurts the people being discriminated against, and that causes blowback that hurts, to varying degrees, the 'type' of people who are discriminating (Even the ones who have not done so.) This blowback can be small if the discriminated group is powerless and small and rarely interact with the discriminators, but, uh, that doesn't describe women.
Men should be trying to fix things as much as women. Even without moral considerations, it hurts us. (Not as much as them, but it does hurt.) Women walk around, for example, viewing us all as potential rapists...because a fairly damn high percentage of us are. Or, at a lesser scale, being viewed as some sort of asshole who will lie to get her in bed and then tell everyone how clever I am. There is almost _no trust_ given to men by women, for completely logical reasons.
I don't _like_ the men who have forced women to think that way about me.
On “The Apocalyptic Bobby Jindal”
I love #11.
No one has ever asserted that any form of marriage is 'discriminatory'.
Apparently, in Jindal's universe, 'traditional marriage' is not 'marriage', at all, it's a law barring gay people from getting married.
You know, all those complaints about the left redefining marriage, and then the right goes and actually _literally_ redefines the word to stop meaning 'A couple joined together'. And instead the word 'marriage' now means 'A law stopping marriage'. (Of which the traditional form is, presumably, barring gays.)
'So, I heard you got married over the summer.'
'Yup, I passed legislation barring gay people from marriage.'
'Well, I also got married this summer, but it wasn't a traditional marriage. Instead of barring gays from marriage, we barred molemen!'
What do people do on their honeymoon...pass laws about driver's licenses?
Hey, wait a second...if 'marriage' means 'barring people from marriage', then wouldn't all that those laws about marriages (By which I mean 'marriage') laws accomplish is...control who can pass laws? I'm so very confused.
"
That said, since they installed their guy in power, the left has been pretty cavalier about the costs of servicing an ever-increasing national debt.
This is just a blatant, bald-faced lie.
Under Obama, the deficit has reduced at the fast rate ever since WWII, dropping like a rock. (And notice I'm not even talking about the sequester.) It's not balanced yet, but that's mostly because Republicans refuse to talk about tax rates. And, of course, we're in a damn recession.
Now, the debt does continue to grow, and it will continue to grow as long as we spend as much money as we're spending (Which _both_ parties agree on and the right has no problem with when it's their guy in power.) and as long as we collect as little in taxes (Which is almost entirely due to Republicans.). Pretending this is the fault of the Democrats is just blatantly lying to everyone.
Look, we're not stupid here. We _know_ the deficit grows hugely under Republicans, and tapers off under Democrats. We _knows this_. It is an actual fact.
That sort of lie might play in public, but no one is falling for it here.
"
One of the more infuriating things about the whole debate was the lack of a Reublican or conservative alternative.
But the _most_ infuriating thing about the whole debate was that we did have a Republican alternative. It was just being pushed by the Democrats.
In a universe where Fox and Koch brothers didn't stab the Republicans in the back with the Tea Party and death panels and other such bullshit immediately after Obama's election, the Republicans could have stood there and claimed the Democrats had finally come around to_their_ proposal from back in 1992.
Instead, the Republicans shifted into reverse so fast they ripped out their transmission, and have been stuck coasting backwards ever since.
"
Republicans are popular in the press only when they’re Republican-bashing. Jindal’s “stupid” comment was carried far and wide. But when he lays out Republican principles, he’s suddenly gone off the reservation.
I like how you're implying there's something wrong with that.
The actual fact is, people who are not the Republican Base are tired of the Republicans pandering to that base with complete nonsense. Even other Republicans are tired of it.
Thus they enjoy people calling them out on it, especially other Republicans, which raises hope the Republican party is not entirely made of morons.
They don't care a flying fuck when yet another Republican says a bunch of completely idiotic stuff. Why, it's almost as if that has become _expected_!(1)
But, go ahead, pretend that this situation somehow is the _slightly_ bit confusing, that you can't understand how a group of nonsense-speaking loons that everyone is tired of only get press when they do something that shows the slightest bit of self-awareness that they _might_ understand how crazy they sound. And they get no press when they're rambling complete gibberish like Jindal has started doing.
1) Holy fuck...wait a second. Are you saying that Jindal's long rambling nonsense _are_ Republican principles? I thought you were a Republican? You actually want the press to _cover_ his statements? Seriously?
You did notice how no one here seems to think his statements were a good thing, right?
On “James Taranto, Louis C.K., and The Brand New War On Men”
I think, at this point, separating out nature vs. nurture WRT to sex is nearly impossible, and hell, even if men do, in some sort of hypothetical imaginary state of nature, push more for sex...there's nothing to say that they can't be socialized the other way, or women socialized to like it more.
Trying to figure out what the human sex drive looks without _any_ sort of culture is nearly impossible, because humans don't even look like _people_ without culture. Trying to argue what people are _without_ socialization is nearly complete nonsense. 'People' are almost entirely memes at this point, a collection of beliefs and behaviors that we pass around.
Men generally, right now, are pushing for sex more than women, and we can _certainly_ change that with socialization (In either direction, in fact.), considering basically all human interaction is due to socialization. Many men also seem to have rather poor notions of women's sovereignty over her own body, and we can certainly change that with socialization also.
It doesn't _particularly_ matter where the 'original cause' is., or if we're ever able to trace it. It would be rather unethical to let people grow up outside society, and while I'm aware that's happened before, I don't think that a _group_ of people have ever done that and anyone observed their sexual norms.
The point I was making was just that if men really are _predisposed_ to something, that it makes more sense to have _harsher_ rules about it, and pay more attention to it, not shrug it off.
But Taranto has apparently confused 'natural inclination' for 'something we should let happen'. Whether or not it _is_ a natural inclination or not, it's certainly something we should decide to not let happen!
And raping people probably, technically, _is_ a natural inclination, just like hitting them on the head and stealing their stuff is. We don't naturally have empathy to people we don't really know, and we don't naturally respect them or their stuff, and will just take it if we can and they can't fight us off. However, here in _civilization_, we are civilized otherwise...except that, WRT rape, men often _aren't_. Aka, rape culture.
And, if women really _do_ want sex as much as men, we have _very clear_ evidence that it is possible to socialize people who want sex into committing rape very rarely. Because we did exactly that with women.
There's not actually any logical way to look at this and conclude what Taranto did. WTF is this nonsense about limiting 'male sexuality'...if male sexuality is _rape_, then hell yes we want to limit it. If men are actually pre-programmed rape machines that can't be changed...then a) stop dis-believing accounts of rape, and b) actually set up a power structure to punish them for that.
Taranto is passing bullshit of the highest order, because he frankly doesn't see rape as a big deal.
"
I suspect that sexual _forwardness_ might in fact be an inextricable part of 'male sexuality'. Or whatever you want to call it. I suspect that men will always 'push' more for sex, due to biology. Even far in the future, in some hypothetical universe where sexism is completely gone, men will be the gender most likely to make sexual advances, because men simply want sex more than women. This is not to imply that this is anything more than a _statistic_, and plenty of women want sex more than men.
I am aware that this is probably not entirely 'political correct' in feminism. (And I really hate using the phrase 'political correct' in quotes that way, because most people who do are assholes.) But there are actual hormonal and physiological differences between men and women that could account for this. (And I could be entirely wrong, and this could all be completely socialized, in which case this is all nonsense.)
OTOH, thinking of this drive as 'aggressiveness' is probably exactly the wrong way to think of it. There's absolutely no reason that 'forwardness' and 'attacking women' need to be the same thing.
How men push for sex, and whether or not they _stop_ when rejected, and how they treat any potential partner, _are_ entirely due to socialization, and we know that for a fact, due to different cultures having different rules throughout history.
Hell, if anything, this idea means that men need to be _more careful_ and have _more rules_ about sexual conduct so their desire for it does not lead into wrongness, and have actual punishments to deter them.
There are only really three choices here:
1) You believe in the difference between how men and women treat sex is entirely social.
2) You believe that there are real differences, that men are much more likely to press forward, while women don't, and thus...
a) ...you believe men need _strict_ rules to stop them from doing so against a women's wishes, along with very specific socialization when young, and that we need to speak out against misogynistic othering of women and all the bullshit of that sort. And we need to root out institutional cultures of rape everywhere they can be found.
b) ...you think men will just rape women, and, hey, that sucks, but what are you going to do? It's not like it's legal or something, we _try_ to stop it, sometimes. A little.
Taranto is apparently of the type 2b.
On “Rand Paul: Not Aristotle”
Democracy is merely a method, not one that necessarily pursues good ends.
I think the best way to say it is that democracy is the best way we've come up with of giving the population what they want.
The problem is, sometimes the population are complete idiots.
Which is why we have a few constitutional failsafes to make sure it doesn't get too far out of whack, although ultimately the population itself must change. (Otherwise they'd end up changing the constitution.)
On “Finance Discussion Continued”
Also, this I think paragraph deserves a special 'Huh?'
It won’t sit in banks. They’ll invest in short-term highly liquid investments like T-Bills, money market funds, commercial paper or repos
Firstly, commercial paper _is_ a loan. You just asserted that money won't be in banks for them to make a commercial mortgage from...because the money will, instead, already have been loaned out to corporations! Oh noes! Corporations won't be able to get loans because all the money will have been given to corporations in the form of loans!
Yes, it's not the _same_ sort of loan, but duh, it's still money in their pocket, and will function just fine keeping the economy moving. (And, of course, corporations tend to keep money in _banks_, so, hey, it's also there, and can be loaned out again.)
Secondly, the weird thing about T-Bills is that, uh, there's a fixed amount of them. The government isn't issuing them for fun, they are issuing them to cover their deficit. Investors can't put 'more money' in T-Bills, all they can do is bid interest rates down.
Thirdly, saying they'll put the money in 'repos' is just saying they'll put the money in the existing securities market in complicated ways. In case you've forgotten, the _other_ side of that market _also_ exists, and once _they_ got the money, _they'd_ put it in the bank.
I swear, it's like everyone else here has this amazingly detailed knowledge of how securities work...and no idea of how the system _used_ to work, without securities. Where money was put in a bank by various people and loaned out by the bank against collateral.
"
How about the investors themselves? Why do you presume that investors that deal with this asset class day in and day out would be better off investing in whole loans when they prefer to invest in mortgage backed securities for the reasons I mentioned?
I GIVE EXACTLY NO FUCKS ABOUT INVESTORS.
I don't quite know how to explain this to you in any simpler terms.
Investors do not have some magical right to have a certain market exist.
Also, if the criticism of mortgage-backed securities is that the sellers of the paper didn’t care about the loans because they weren’t bearing the risk, then how does whole loans mitigate that issue when someone selling a whole loan is also not the person bearing the risk? This is important.
The risk is migrated because there is a lot _less_ selling.
When you do _less_ of something, it is _by definition_ less dangerous.
It’s not up to you to decide that.
*checks his wallet* A voter registration card. Hrm.
*checks the constitution* Regulate interstate commerce. Hrm.
I guess it _is_ up to me, along with every other voter, to decide which securities can legally be sold in this country.
It is this kind of folk economics that leads me to believe that you have no understanding of these markets. Investors in mortgage-backed securities, especially AAA, AA or A-rated securities are not gambling. If you’ve ever dealt with investment officers at pension funds, they aren’t the gambling type (making bad investments does not constitute gambling btw).
Just defining something as 'not gambling' does not, in fact, make it not be gambling.
They are buying what they believe are safe investments based on the risk. This is always how the MBS markets functioned. Even when the toxic sludge got the AAA ratings, investors bought them on the premise they were safe. How is that gambling? They may have been victims of fraud.
And, of course, it would be crazy for the government to do something to make it harder to sell fraudulent products, or even outlaw certain types of things all together.
No if you'll excuse me, I have to go drink my daily snake oil to cure my cough before I restart my perpetual motion machine that seems a little flakey.
The real fear back then was that the lack of access to the conduit lenders as a vehicle for refinancing would trigger a mass of loan defaults if only because borrowers were not able to refinance loans. I don’t remember the exact number off the top of my head but CMBS had maybe 33% or more of the total commercial mortgage market. The other lenders in the market could have picked up a little bit of this slack but not all of it. The fear was a mass selloff. It never materialized because loan servicers began to play the extend-and-pretend game and just let borrowers continue to make payments (a strategy that was quite helpful actually).
So you're standing there and _pointing out_ that mortgage securities only had _a third_ of the commercial mortgage market to start with, yet, you are predict ABSOLUTE CALAMITY if that third goes away. Because there's no other way that last _third_ could exist. I mean, it's not like two-thirds of the market wasn't entirely fine with holding their mortgages without sticking them in securities.
*holds hand to earth* Oh, I'm being told they _were_ fine with doing that.
In your scenario, a lot of investors would take losses since they would no longer be able to refinance. Those investors have companies. Those companies have employees. Those employees can end up losing jobs as the firms take massive losses. If those firms are, say, private equity, then their investors (pension funds among others) take a huge hit on their equity/alternative investment allocations.
...because investment firms, if they can't continue to invest in a certain specific type of investment, just close their doors and fire everyone.
You know, I don't actually care about investors, so _technically_ I shouldn't care if this was going to happen...but it's a completely idiotic premise anyway.
On the residential side, I don’t see much difference between your scenario and 2006 and 2007 when the residential mortgage-backed securities market fell apart. It led to a drop in property values and massive foreclosures as borrowers couldn’t refinance loans and/or not afford to make payments.
...my 'scenario'? I don't think I proposed _any_ way to do what I was saying (I gave a hypothetical of banks having to keep 90% of loans, but then I clearly stated that was not a very good idea for other reasons), nor any time frame.
Now, to come up with some way that my idea is bad, you've decided randomly I was talking about doing it _all at once_. Which _obviously_ would cause a huge shock to all all sorts of things.
Of course, I haven't any point suggested doing things that way. Obviously, phasing out a market would take a rather long time.
On the residential side, I don’t see much difference between your scenario and 2006 and 2007 when the residential mortgage-backed securities market fell apart. It led to a drop in property values and massive foreclosures as borrowers couldn’t refinance loans and/or not afford to make payments.
Really? You don't see a difference between my plan and a _short-term disruption of the market_? Did you really just say 'If we got rid of mortgage backed securities all at once, we'd have to suffer through a few years of slowed growth, and then everything would be fine'?
Well, yes. I _entirely_ agree with that premise. The _only_ bad effect of removing that market would, indeed, be temporarily slowed growth.
Moreover, if we do it _slowly_, phasing in rules that make it more and more difficult to make mortgage-backed securities over a decade or so, and slowly let the existing market expire, we won't even have to suffer through slowed growth.
It moves to the sidelines
Where investors would keep their money, because they're all stupid or something.
It won’t sit in banks. They’ll invest in short-term highly liquid investments like T-Bills, money market funds, commercial paper or repos. Even if it sat in banks, who says the banks will increase lending? You’re making as many assumptions about your point of view as I am mine.
Um, banks would _have_ to increase lending if they actually wished to make money. Because that is how banks _normally_ make money. At minimum, they need to make loans to cover the interest they're paying on deposits.
Are you actually asserting that banks have decided to not actually do their job? That they are now somehow fundamentally incapable of turning their deposits into loans, and taking a cut of the difference interest rates? (You know, how _banks_ work?) That no one would step in and _start_ doing that if the banks refused?
Did you earlier accuse _me_ of not understand the markets? Do you actually understand what a _bank_ is, or is that just some strange word for 'investment house' in your dictionary?
"
Okay, I don't understand at all.
I get the claim that trading on an actual exchange would stop the collapse that happened because no one could actually cover their positions. (Although, frankly, I had forgotten that is what actually _caused_ the collapse.)
What I don't get is what this has to do with ratings or what it was to do with your first sentence, or how it would help with the _other_ problem, specifically, everyone was actually lying about the _contents_ of the securities, and the loans were all overrated, and no one was actually bothering to create the securities correctly. That is the 'rating' problem that I thought we were talking about.
Not letting the entire damn markets assume insane positions would, indeed, be helped by an actual exchange, but that doesn't really seem to fix the fact it was a market in trading crap and lies to start with.
Is the idea that the exchange itself would regulate what was on the market? Why would it do that?
"
'Why the hell do we have to wear stilts all the time?'
'It keeps our shoes from getting muddy. We need to keep from being muddy.'
'...you were here five minutes ago when the stilts caused us to fall over and faceplant into the mud, totally ruining our entire set of clothes, right?'
"
Dave contends, with commendable insight, the ratings agencies are at the root of the problem.
Erm, not really. Yes, they gave absurd ratings to crap, but that was just because they were paid to do so. They weren't the 'root', they were just a participant.
But how would anyone rate these critters effectively? In a pool of a thousand mortgages, how could anyone know what’s going on?
If we can't trust third-party ratings agencies (And we clearly cannot trust them.), and we obviously wouldn't be so insane as to start trusting the _banks_ to rate themselves...then what?
This article is because I ask the question 'Why do we need a mortgage-backed security market in the first place?'
Well, here is a related question: Please explain how a mortgage-based security market is supposed to work when it is patently obviously that everyone involved in it is willing to blatantly and continually lie?
On “The Shockingly Small Worth of a Woman’s Life: Texas, Gun Culture, and Black & White Worlds”
It really won't be that hard to set up a fake situation where it was legal to shoot someone that people can't _disprove_. (Slip a valuable necklace of yours in their bag in public, shoot them dead when they refuse to search their own stuff and try to leave.)
But for maximum fun, the trick is setting up an situation where you can shoot them dead and are legally correct even if _all_ the facts are known.
Since apparently _illegal_ transaction are required to be fulfilled or you can shoot the person (?!) there's an obvious one to get politicians:
1) Give one of them a campaign contribution.
2) Suggest that they vote a certain way on the law that they're not going to vote.
3) After they fail to vote that way, assert that they didn't provide the service you were expecting, and demand a refund of your vote buying. (Bring a film crew when you do this.) They will of course assert that you did _not_ purchase their vote, and will almost certainly refuse to return your contribution, as that would make them look guilty of having sold their vote.
4) Shoot them. Sorry, I mean shoot _towards_ them.
It's pretty much exactly what happened here.
On “Finance Discussion Continued”
No, I wasn't complaining that we didn't solve problems before they happen...almost no one manages to do that, even if a few people do see the problem. The amount of countries that have said 'Hey, wait, if we let this keep happening we could have a problem in a decade.' is almost nil. I wasn't taking issue with that. :)
But we do seem to the be the only country unwilling to solve them _after_ they happen, though, under some odd theory that we're 'too close' to the problem to effectively see it or 'too emotional'.
So we ignore it long enough that it wraps back around to being a problem that 'doesn't happen', so no one can fix it then either. We are in danger of doing it with the financial industry.
It's a really stupid pattern with us. I dunno, perhaps it happens in other countries too.
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Indeed. People who argue the problem is solved are fools. It _might_ be solved with mortgages, or might not. But if it is solved there, it will just pop up elsewhere. The finance industry are goddamn lunatics playing with other people's money.
Part of the problem, of course, is that they generate a lot of the money that exists. So they're all desperately trying to generate it _in their pocket_.
Normal human beings, us mere mortals, need a system that is safe, period. All normal transactions with banks should be in a bubble that is _actually safe_.
You know what, my earlier question about why we need mortgage-backed securities didn't go far enough? Why do we even need _private banks_?
Or, rather, why shouldn't we have a public bank that is actually just the US Treasury? It could hold our money and pay interest on it, it could (In fact, used to) issue student loans, it could even give mortgages to people. It could handle the banking needs of 90% of the population.
(Just watch, someone is about to explain to me how private banks work, completely ignoring my question of why we can't have a public one.)
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The actual point of the CMBS marketplace is to provide a vehicle for the trading of an asset that generates a predictable cash flow. Lots of things like cash flows. Pension funds, for one example, were big buyers of MBS. They need to do something with the cash coming in off of people’s paychecks. Assets with predictable cash flows serve as a great vehicle for generating the income streams necessary to pay off current pension obligations.
*facepalm*
I guess I need to be more specific in my questions. I just asked for a reason for the market to exist, and that is, in fact, technically 'a' reason.
I shall rephrase: Does anyone have a GOOD reason to for the mortgage-based securities market to exist. Something it actually _does_, not something it failed horrifically at and destroyed everyone's pensions?
We could, in theory, turn banking back about 60 years and prohibit banks from (a) selling any loans that they originate and (b) hedging any risk that they carry. Many people believe that such an act would constitute slicing off your head to spite your face; the resulting reduction in liquidity would cause a massive collapse in global investment.
Yes, destroying the mortgage-based security market would, indeed, cause a massive collapse in global investment, or at least a massive collapse in global investment in mortgage-based security. That's sorta implied in the premise _of_ destroying the market.
My question is: Why the fuck should _any_ of us care about the mortgage-based security market?
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It is important. When you sell your house, who writes you a check? Whose money backs that check? That’s ultimately investor money, not the bank’s money.
And it _used_ to be depositor money, and that system worked _perfectly well_.
We live in a world where fractional reserve banking keeps capitalism afloat.
Erm, the old system I'm talking about, before banks decided to invent this nonsense, is also 'fractional reserve'. $100 is _deposited_ in a bank, and $200 is loaned out.
Now, banks use 'investors', and depositors are completely SOL. Which is another reason this idiotic system needs to be justified....now no one gets interest anymore, because banks have enough money _without_ deposits.
And you're about to assert the economy is so much bigger now, so that deposits can't provide enough.
To that I say, firstly, 'Huh?', because money not invested in securities is invested in stocks, so is still in the economy, or deposited in banks to gain interest...which means it will be loaned out. The lack of a type of investment doesn't mean money gets put in mattresses.
Secondly, I point out, the amount of _printed_ money is not some fixed invariant number. We don't have to wave a magical mortgaged-base security wand to create enough. If less money is created via fractional reserve without securities than with it, and we want the later amount, we can just _print more_.
On “The Shockingly Small Worth of a Woman’s Life: Texas, Gun Culture, and Black & White Worlds”
No shit.
Look, the idea that you can kill people who refuse to provide a service to your satisfaction and don't provide a refund, under an idiotic law about 'theft', sounds like a badly designed law, so, you know, benefit of the doubt.
But the idea you can _shoot at someone's car and kill them_, and not be charged with fucking murder, is not any sort of law at all.
Texas: The state where it's apparently legal to fire your gun randomly as long as you assert later you didn't intend to kill anyone.
What the prostitute _should_ have done is felt threatened. I mean, it's not like _she_ knows where he was shooting. Then she could have Stood Her Ground and shot him. Actually, I'm kidding...she really could have legally shot him in _any_ state, under general self-defense. He was shooting at her while she was trying to flee! Even the most restrictive self-defense laws would allow responding to gunfire in kind.
Whenever the law says that two people have the right to kill each other in the same specific circumstances, the law is completely and utterly stupid.
I really wish some 'malicious' people would wander from state to state with these sort of idiotic laws that allow you shoot people with without consequences, and maneuver these moronic _lawmakers_ into such situations, and shoot them. Maybe not kill them, but shoot them real good.
On “Finance Discussion Continued”
The markets are very useful. I’ve laid out reasons why I think they are.
No, you haven't.
You've explained why people need to be able to slice up loans if they want to invest in the market, and why grouping a bunch of loans together allows diversification of risk. (Although I actually have objections to the second. Nothing is stopping investors from just investing individually in a bunch of mortgages, there's no reason we need to make an actual security out of the group. But that's not important right now.)
You have failed to explain the _actual point_ of the market in the first place.
I understand and mostly agree how things need to be if we wish to have a market in mortgage investment.
But I ask '…and those reasons are?' and you respond with 'If I am an investor and I have an allocation to make towards commercial real estate loans...'
That is not a 'reason'. That is an assumption that such a market should exist to start with.
Please state what you think would actually happen if, for example (And this is just an example and I think it would be overkill and in no way actually suggest it) we required banks to keep 90% of the mortgages they issued and it was illegal to sell securities or derivatives of those, or get insurance on them. Please explain it in terms of what would actually happen to the economy or to normal humans beings, not the people who are currently gambling in the casino, who we all _know_ would have to go elsewhere.
The only claim I've heard is that capital would dry up. Which seems reasonable to some extent, except, wait. Investor money doesn't just disappear. Logically, it would be invested in something else and continue to exist. Perhaps in the corporations themselves so they didn't have to get such large loans, or perhaps people would just invest in the banks. Otherwise, the money would just...uh...sit in banks, so it _would_ be available for issuing loans. Hrm, interesting.
On “Let the Character Assassinations Begin”
The problem is that there are various industries entirely held by unions.
The entire entertainment industry, for example. Shipping, for another.
And once you get rid of the laws barring sympathetic strikes...
Or laws that allow unions to be punished for what union members do... (Imagine that outgoing shipment gets blocked by a single striking worker, who is then arrested. One at a time. And the union can't be held liable for this.)
Or laws that require unions to have a certain _portion_ of workers. What if the dozen repairmen in a factory of three hundred decided that _they_ were going to strike?
I'm not entirely convinced most workers would end up worse off without union law, is all I'm saying. I'm not saying I actually _want_ that removed, I just think the reality of 'no laws about unions' would be rather different than most people _proposing_ that think, because they have appear to have literally no idea that labor laws actually restrict unions in a lot of ways.
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