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Didn't you see his notation that what he said was in SARCASM???
Do you know what SARCASM is??
It's too bad that there are so many who have said as much and who actually meant it.
I wasn't the only one who missed his sarcasm note and who later apologized.
If you read further in the thread, you will see that.
They let the banks self regulate and look at where it's gotten us.
No, they didn't let banks 'self regulate.' Fannie's and Freddie's millions of counts of intentional securities fraud is what caused the financial crisis. It has now been found that Fannie and Freddie intentionallymisrepresented the risk on the $5 trillion worth of secondary mortgage market loans/MBS's they either hold on their own books or sold throughout the worldwide financial system.
If you want to know what happened, beginning with Bernanke's explanation...
"BEN BERNANKE: Oh, the worst moments were back in September. The financial crisis began with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the large housing companies that were taken over by the government, and subsequent to that a number of very large financial firms came under enormous pressure. One of them, Lehman Brothers, an investment bank, failed. Others came close to failure, needed government support, not just in the United States, but around the world. And those were some very long nights I spent on the sofa in my office as we worked to try to keep the financial system running." At Forum, Bernanke Defends Fed's Aggressive Moves | Online NewsHour | July 27, 2009 | PBS
Massive fraud at Fannie and Freddie: "...Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer for Fannie Mae and a housing expert, has found that from the time Fannie and Freddie began buying risky loans as early as 1993, they routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring, reporting them as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime or Alt-A. In general, a subprime mortgage refers to the credit of the borrower. A FICO score of less than 660 is the dividing line between prime and subprime, but Fannie and Freddie were reporting these mortgages as prime, according to Mr. Pinto. Fannie has admitted this in a third-quarter 10-Q report in 2008. ...It is easy to see how this misrepresentation was a principal cause of the financial crisis. ...because of Fannie and Freddie's mislabeling, there were millions more high-risk loans outstanding. That meant default rates as well as the actual losses after foreclosure were going to be outside all prior experience." Peter J. Wallison: The Price for Fannie and Freddie Keeps Going Up - WSJ.com
"First, absent some intervening criminal act by actors farther downstream (and we may yet find some), we have isolated absolutely the cause of all that followed.
Second, it becomes quite easy to construct a criminal case for literally millions of counts of accounting, securities, wire and mail fraud against the GSEs. To the extent executives at Fannie and Freddie signed off on financial statements disclosing the portion of their balance sheets that held "AAA" securities and these had been purposefully misidentified we should be exploring prosecution for violations under e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley. (Given, however, Rham Emanuel's involvement in Freddie and Fannie, we aren't holding our breath).
...It should shock you that literally a third of the U.S. economy should become a playground for the social experiments of any political group of any party affiliation.
It probably will not shock you (since you are reading Zero Hedge) to find what may be the largest example of securities fraud ever directly connected to elected officials of the United States and their cronies." Origins of an American Kleptocracy | zero hedge
(GSE = Fannie and Freddie)
Fear and ignorance is the only thing stopping us from addressing an issue that is out of control.
Odd for you to say that considering that you don't seem to understand much about how ineffective the government is at managing health care, let alone the financial crisis.
I'm not going to copy and paste a bunch of links for you -- in an attempt to convince you that I know what I'm talking about.
What I do understand from reading your many posts is that you enjoy telling other people that they don't understand anything -- but you do.
Does Bernanke know what he's talking about? I quoted Bernanke's own words.
And no, you couldn't be further from the truth... I don't enjoy telling people they don't understand. Why not? The problems our country is having are because so many people don't understand what has been/is going on.
A friend of mine was in Vanderbilt Hospital for three days in the burn unit and the medical bill is 80,000 dollars and this person has no medical insurance. Now I see why everyone needs health insurance without question. And this friend's wife was in and out as a out patient and her bill is 20,000.
John
NO!!! This is why we need health care reform. We need to get the price of health care way DOWN. As it is, health care providers are willing to negotiate and charge much less for medical bills that don't go through insurance. For example, a year ago there was a news article about a doctor that needed surgery on his elbow after a sporting accident. He was between jobs and didn't have health insurance. Had he had health insurance, the surgery would have cost about $15K, but he was able to negotiate the price of his surgery closer to $6K as he was going to pay for it out of pocket. I think that he took a home equity line of credit against his home.
I'm all for everyone having access to medical care. But if we just go ahead and say that everyone has to be covered by the health insurance companies without addressing the outrageous health care costs, it's going to cost all of us in higher insurance premiums in the end.
Otherwise, I read a post on C-D where the member said that he'd paid out about $165,000 in insurance premiums over the years, but never once filed a claim. He'd paid out $450 a month for many years... what a shame that he couldn't have instead put $450 a month in a savings account as a rainy day emergency fund. In other words, too bad he didn't have an option of self insuring himself. And when he doesn't ever use it, he has a nice nest egg at the end. $165K plus interest... that's a nice sum of money. However, most of us don't have the self discipline to put aside money every week or month and just never touch it.
Anyway, the cost of health care in the US is outrageous high. We need to work to bring the costs down in tandem with getting health insurance for everyone. And what we really need is everyone having catastrophic health insurance, with each of us choosing what we want to have for a deductible.
I don't want free doctors appointments, free tests or free mammograms. I just want affordable health care services. We also need more primary care doctors at affordable health clinics.
I feel that we don't have enough doctors to attend to every single person in the US... so we also need to train more medical personnel and give them incentives to be primary care/general practitioner type doctors, not fancy specialists like plastic surgeons.
I'm so sick and tired of the Conservatives basically saying "Can't afford insurance? Well, time to bite the dust then".
Great that you all have never in a position of need. But there are millions of Americans out there that do need it.
So much irgnorance, it's not funny. Wondering if that's what the founding fathers wanted. Americans giving a **** about fellow Americans.
I got this far and had to address it.
These folks were so poor, they had to live in a shack with a woodstove.
They smoked "a lot".
As a former smoker (somewhere around 8 months so far! ) I know it's expensive. If they each only smoked 1 pack a day (which isn't really considered 'a lot' by smokers) then they were spending AT LEAST $8/day on cigarettes. That's $240/mo.
Now, $240 might not sound like 'a lot', but to a family the OP is claiming is poor and live in a shack, that's probably a lot. If you can't afford necessary things for your 5 kids, but you spend money on things like beer and cigarettes, then you do NOT DESERVE my tax dollars. Where is the parent's personal responsibility in all this?
$100k in medical bills? Wah. Go tell it to the clerk at the 7-11.
Vanderbilt Hospital said in a news article that they lost over 234 million dollars because of people that didn't have medical insurance. I'm now looking for the article which I cann't seem to find.
A friend of mine was in Vanderbilt Hospital for three days in the burn unit and the medical bill is 80,000 dollars and this person has no medical insurance. Now I see why everyone needs health insurance without question. And this friend's wife was in and out as a out patient and her bill is 20,000.
John
We need health care when we need health, not insurance in case we need health care.
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