Would we be better off if women dominated our financial system? (enemies, legal)

[sickofnyc]

Originally Posted by 58robbo

blaming the current crisis on greed is like blaming an air crash on gravity. greed is ever present. it has been there from the beginning of time and will be around until our last days

Only now there are more venues to exercise and display the greed. Wall Street has become a gambling mecca and I'm still waiting for them to hang out neon signs. More and more people are enabling greedy corporations to make a$$es of us via pharmaceuticals, industialized food, products made with unfair trade agreements, not enough demand for energy independence, out of control bank policies and bailouts, health insurance monopolies, etc.

[odinloki1]

Originally Posted by 58robbo

blaming the current crisis on greed is like blaming an air crash on gravity. greed is ever present. it has been there from the beginning of time and will be around until our last days

of course it is. However, there are people who can seperate greed from profit motive. There are also those who can use this amazing thing that a lot of Americans exercise every day, its called self control and they use it to keep their greed in check and keep them from making stupid, shortsighted decisions (which is essentially what put us in our current mess)

This crisis, just like most others, can be blamed on excessive greed (for power, or money) by a few individuals, whose egos wouldn't let them exercise some self control.

Your argument that it(greed) is ever present so who cares, means basically people shouldn't be held accountable for their actions. It was inevitable that someone would get greedy and screw things up so why should they be punished or held accountable.

[momonkey]

Originally Posted by kovert

Elizabeth Warren warned about the coming financial crisis and is championing the creation of a Consumer Finance Protection Agency.

Brooksley Born & Janet Tavakoli warned of the dangers of "shadow banking" over a decade ago.

And now we have Ms. Cantwell, waging a war against Wall Street and their stooges both in and out of Washington.

I'm usually anti-discrimination but does any one else think that maybe are financial system should be run by women?

It seems like the ones really pushing for reform are the women and the greed and arrogance of men that got us into this mess, though I recognize it was Ann Ryand that got Greenie swooning over the self-regulating market fantasy.

Well, we had a chance last year to put some of the people who have been ringing the alarm for many years into power, but entitlement America decided they wanted nondescript "hope and change" instead.




YouTube - Shocking Video Unearthed Democrats in their own words Covering up the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Scam that caused our Economic Crisis




YouTube - Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Democrats are Clueless on Freddie Mac Fannie Mae and the financial credit crisis.


Aren't Pelosi and Waters females?

[kovert]

Originally Posted by 58robbo

lots of people warned about the financial crisis. europeans have lots of consumer finance protection agencies. what did they help. i know some people here who owe 3 times their annual salary on credit cards.

the market is the only force that can deliver the message. my advice to my bud last night was to consider filing for bankruptcy. this poor clown owes around £100 000 on CREDIT CARDS!!!!!!. living with the pressure of switching to better deals, 0% balance transfers etc and even then the majority slice of his income goes into servicing the debt. i don't think the poor guy even earns £40k.

if he walks, the judge might garnish some of his wages, but it is the banks who suffer the greatest loss as they should! they are supposed to be prudent guardians of depositors wealth, but these days with fdic, nobody bothers to hold their banks up to high lending standards.

Canadians made out alright.

Originally Posted by delusianne

In times of crisis, good news is no news. Iceland’s meltdown made headlines; the remarkable stability of Canada’s banks, not so much.
***
Over the past decade the United States and Canada faced the same global environment. Both were confronted with the same flood of cheap goods and cheap money from Asia. Economists in both countries cheerfully declared that the era of severe recessions was over.

But when things fell apart, the consequences were very different here and there. In the United States, mortgage defaults soared, some major financial institutions collapsed, and others survived only thanks to huge government bailouts. In Canada, none of that happened. What did the Canadians do differently?

Op-Ed Columnist - Good and Boring - NYTimes.com

momonkey, it was the greed and ego of men that brought us to the brink (albeit under the influence of that siren Rand) and one woman stood up and got burned for calling the boys club out.

Originally Posted by Blind Sniper

After watching this on PBS Frontline my blood was brought to near boiling (again). From what I can tell this is not a partisan whack job. Congress was warned 11 years back about non-regulated trading with OTC dirivatives.

What really amazes me is how some hacks on one side or the other are still banging the drum of hands off Wall Street / the market will work itself out.

There is pending legislation right now to regulate Wall Street before they can cook up another economic virus. This would be good for the American Middle / Working Class but the Republicans are all voting against the bill for some reason. Gee, I wonder what their motivation could be....???
Then there are the lobbyist for the financial sector who don't want this bill to pass either, for obvious reasons... I wish we could pass a law to make lobbyist illegal, punishable by public hanging!!


FRONTLINE: the warning | PBS

[Freemore]

YES we have controlled the purse strings for eons.

[58robbo]

Originally Posted by kovert

Canadians made out alright.


momonkey, it was the greed and ego of men that brought us to the brink (albeit under the influence of that siren Rand) and one woman stood up and got burned for calling the boys club out.

canadians aren't exactly out of the woods yet. their real estate prices are still way to high and that would suggest that many people are seriously over extended. it will turn at some point and their real estate bubble will pop eventually.


your response to momonkey implies a total missunderstanding of rand and her concept of selfishness. rather than explain it myself perhaps john allison of bbt, a bank which made no subprime loans, might be able to put the concept into terms you'll understand.


YouTube - John Stossel Fox Business 01-07-10 Atlas Shrugged 1 of 6 watch from 4:15

[kovert]

Originally Posted by 58robbo

your response to momonkey implies a total missunderstanding of rand and her concept of selfishness. rather than explain it myself perhaps john allison of bbt, a bank which made no subprime loans, might be able to put the concept into terms you'll understand.

YouTube - John Stossel Fox Business 01-07-10 Atlas Shrugged 1 of 6 watch from 4:15

Thanks for the vid. I very much agree that rational self-interest is a beneficial trait to have and it can help an individual achieve greatness.

The fact of the matter is that it has been largely irrational greed and ego that have lead to the greatest global (not individual) financial crisis since the Great Depression.

I may have been misunderstood an important point, but so has Alan Greenspan, which this movie so vividly documents.

Originally Posted by kovert

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And the Man Himself, Mr. Alan:
"The tough talk reflected a widening sense that some of Greenspan's apparent successes in managing the economy from 1987 to 2006 were in fact illusory, that they came at the cost of building the biggest credit bubble in world history."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He noted that the immense and largely unregulated business of spreading financial risk widely, through the use of exotic financial instruments called derivatives, had gotten out of control and had added to the havoc of today’s crisis. As far back as 1994, Mr. Greenspan staunchly and successfully opposed tougher regulation on derivatives.

Many Republican lawmakers on the oversight committee tried to blame the mortgage meltdown on the unchecked growth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government-sponsored mortgage-finance companies that were placed in a government conservatorship last month. Republicans have argued that Democratic lawmakers blocked measures to reform the companies.

But Mr. Greenspan, who was first appointed by President Ronald Reagan, placed far more blame on the Wall Street companies that bundled subprime mortgages into pools and sold them as mortgage-backed securities. Global demand for the securities was so high, he said, that Wall Street companies pressured lenders to lower their standards and produce more “paper.”"

And not just Greenspan.

Originally Posted by kovert

"None other than Milton Friedman, the founding father of the free-market era, told me in an interview before he died that Stiglitz also had been more correct than everyone else about how to transform Russia into a market economy when he argued that institution-building and creating regulatory authorities were an important preliminary step. "In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, I kept being asked what the Russians should do," Friedman told me in 2002. "I said, 'Privatize, privatize, privatize. I was wrong. Joe was right. What we want is privatization, and the rule of law.
As his longtime collaborator Bruce Greenwald—another Columbia professor who, by the way, is a conservative Republican—puts it: "You need radical global reform" to correct chronic imbalances in capital flows, all of which Stiglitz has laid out in his book, "Making Globalization Work." "There's no chance these guys are going to do what's necessary," with the possible exception of Summers, says Greenwald."

And by no means is he anti-capitalism.

"Stiglitz argues that free trade and open markets could be forces for good -- reducing poverty in the Third World, sharing technology across borders, moving investment from rich nations to poor. But he says that trade has been "badly managed" by the rich countries and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), causing unnecessary instability and hardship in the developing world.
If Stiglitz finds fault with the big institutions of world trade, however, he would not tear them down. In fact, he thinks that free trade will ultimately be a good thing. And suddenly he sounds more like the leading scholars in international economics"

Though I wonder, if I was so off on Rand and apparently you have such a great understanding of her philosophy, why don't you explain it yourself?

[58robbo]

Originally Posted by kovert

Thanks for the vid. I very much agree that rational self-interest is a beneficial trait to have and it can help an individual achieve greatness.

The fact of the matter is that it has been largely irrational greed and ego that have lead to the greatest global (not individual) financial crisis since the Great Depression.

I may have been misunderstood an important point, but so has Alan Greenspan, which this movie so vividly documents.

to understand why banks behaved irrationally we have to examine the parties.
-the depositor is govt insured. the depositor no longer cares how prudent his bank behaves.
-the bank can unload all of its imprudent lending on the secondary market generally to fannie and freddie who have been encouraged by govt to purchase most of this trash
-banks have also been forced into lowering lending stds through programs like cra with the implicit guarantee from govt.


essentially banks went to vegas with our money and were encouraged by our govt to go wild. if they made big buck, sweet. if not, uncle hank would be standing by with one of his bazookas to bail you out of trouble

[florida.bob]

Originally Posted by Huckleberry3911948

they already do. who controls the wallet in every home?

I know, when I was married, my wife made all the day to day decisions on our spending. Household, car, groceries, investments ... That left me time to make all the BIG decisions, Foreign Relations, War, Space Program .... It worked well, maybe not so well, she is my former wife. Apparently I didn't make those BIG decisions well enough.

[BentBow]

Ever see a woman and their relationship with their credit cards??