[nfb-talk] blind and wanting to improve things, not get labeled

Thu Apr 22 21:08:45 UTC 2010

Huh? I know all about this stuff. But its why I said the government didn't 
*cause* the crisis, it only failed to stop it.

The law you're talking about that was around since the 1930s is called 
"Glass-Steagal". I'm not sure about the spelling. It made banks declare 
themselves either commercial banks or investment banks. A bank couldn't both 
issue mortgages and sell them to investors. So the bank that issued your 
mortgage had to make sure you could pay it back.  That law was repealed 
durning the Clinton administration. Republicans wanted it repealed it 
because they believe deregulating banks would be good for business. 
Democrats wanted it repealed because they believed that it would allow 
people who wouldn't currently qualify for mortgages to get   them.

Soon, banks started selling collections of mortgages  as investments. They 
called them Collateralized Debt Obligations or CDOs. They didn't 
particularly care whether the CDOs were actually good investments or not 
because they made their money on commissions. There's evidence that some of 
these banks knew the CDOs were bad investments because they bought Credit 
Default Swaps (CDSs) on them. A CDS is essentially insurance taken out 
against a bad investment. The only thing is you could buy insurance for many 
times what the investment was worth. In fact, it didn't even have to be your 
own investment. You could buy a CDS betting that somebody else's investment 
would go bad. When the housing bubble burst, the banks were stuck with the 
CDOs or owed on the CDSs. And they couldn't pay. Hence the trillion dollar 
banking crisis.

What I assumed TJC was referring to was the practice of letting banks pick 
their own federal regulators. A lot of these practices aren't implicitly 
covered by the regulations and its up to the regulator to decide whether the 
bank is following the law or not.
So banks would pick the regulators most likely to let them do what they 
wanted to do.

Actually, its probably not true that repealing Glass-Steagal led to the 
banking crisis. Repealing G-S made CDOs possible but if CDOs didn't exist, 
some other instrament would have been invented to cause the same crisis. The 
same banking crisis occured in Iceland, Ireland, and Estonia and obviously, 
those contries were never covered by G-S. I can explain why some instrament 
had to be invented for bankers to sell but this message is already long 
enough.

The point is that a crisis that results from repealing regulations and/or 
failing to enforce regulations cannot possibly provide evidence that 
regulations are unnecessary. That logic is about as backward as logic can 
get. Its an argument in *favor* of government regulations, not against them.

PS: I didn't have to look any of this stuff up. I already knew it. In fact, 
I'm a little iffy on the spelling of Glass-Steagal. Anyway, I don't think 
its a lot to expect that anyone who has an opinion on these issues should 
know this stuff.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "qubit" <lauraeaves at yahoo.com>
To: "NFB Talk Mailing List" <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2010 12:17 PM
Subject: Re: [nfb-talk] blind and wanting to improve things, not get labeled

> You should sometime listen to the report that was on 60 Minutes recently
> about what really caused the economy to fall. It was a coordinated effort
> between a few financiers who cooked up a scheme to make it big, pulled
> strings to get the rules changed that had been in place since the stock
> market crash of 1929  preventing people from betting on certain assets, 
> the
> then the sale of a huge number of mortgages to people who couldn't afford
> them and forming something called a "credit default swap" that would shift
> the money around to get it to where certain people wanted it...
> It was actually a bit above my head as I am a software developer and can't
> stand fincial speak. Anyway, it all happened during the Clinton and Bush43
> administrations, and very few people actually knew what was going on.
> This is why I have almost no trust of banks.  Also why I have a problem 
> with
> the particular stimulus bill that was smashed through Congress when Obama
> first got in. Remember? No one read it, just voted one way or the other.
> Now personally, I like Obama, just some people in his confidence I don't
> like.
> How can anyone judge anything. You just have to go by your gut.
> --le
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "John G. Heim" <jheim at math.wisc.edu>
> To: "NFB Talk Mailing List" <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2010 11:54 AM
> Subject: Re: [nfb-talk] blind and wanting to improve things, not get 
> labeled
>
>
> Holy cow, I keep hearing this argument and each time I just become more
> boggled. How in the world can someone argue that a banking crisis 
> resulting
> from poorly enforced government regulations proves that we don't need 
> those
> regulations? Its to ridiculous for words.
>
> If you claim that the banking crisis came about because the government
> failed to enforce its own regulations, that doesn't show that we don't 
> need
> the regulations. In fact, it quite clearly demonstrates how *much* we need
> them.
>
> Saying capitalism didn't fail is like saying the Titanic didn't sink. It 
> was
> just that an iceberg got in the way. Yes, capitalism did fail. Government
> also failed but what it failed at was keeping capitalism from failing.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "T. Joseph Carter" <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com>
> To: "NFB Talk Mailing List" <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2010 3:07 AM
> Subject: Re: [nfb-talk] blind and wanting to improve things, not get 
> labeled
>
>
>> Notably, most of the fraud that people blame on the "money crowd" that
>> caused the financial debacle was the result of about three large firms,
>> who were basically paying the government to not do proper oversight,
>> combined with the government's own socialized mortgage industry which was
>> operating ridiculously.
>>
>> Capitalism didn't fail, government and private corruption failed.
>>
>> A bunch of blind people debating it on a mailing list aren't going to
>> suddenly find the magic pill to fix that problem, because none exists. 
>> We
>> do have several recessions and a couple of depressions to look at for 
>> what
>> did and didn't work, but even those things that did work are not a magic
>> pill.  There are still bad times to suffer through.  The remedies that
>> work just make the bad times go away faster.
>>
>> I think we're nearing the end of the useful debate on the topic of 
>> liberal
>> vs. conservative vs. party affiliation on this list.  It's clear to me
>> that Ryan's list has merit because there are more people in line with it
>> than its target audience probably thought.  I think that says what need 
>> be
>> said on the matter.
>>
>> Joseph
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 07:29:24PM -0500, David Andrews wrote:
>>>Yes, the government wastes some money, but so does private industry, 
>>>small
>>>business, and everybody else.  No process is perfect, there will be some
>>>waste, fraud, and everything else in any process.  Look at the financial
>>>debacle we are just coming out of.  I don't think government is any
>>>better, or worse at running things as anybody else.  The money crowd 
>>>wants
>>>to be left alone, until they mess up terminally, then they want the
>>>government to step in, no strings attached.
>>>
>>>Dave
>>>
>>>At 01:25 PM 4/21/2010, you wrote:
>>>>Hello-
>>>>I'm just going to put my two cents in here. I think that when the
>>>>government does stuff, it ends up swallowing up a lot of money that is
>>>>wasted. I have spent several months applying for jobs in the federal
>>>>government and it has been a bit of a comic sketch. At the same time,
>>>>we have people in our society for whom we need to care, and the fact
>>>>is that any point in time, most people end up in that position.
>>>>Ideally, we would privately take care of this on our own- people
>>>>within a community would rise up and put together their own education
>>>>system for their kids and for all of them, we would help people out
>>>>with food when they needed it, doctors and therapists would take on a
>>>>few patients and clients pro bono at any one time. But until people
>>>>choose to do that over buying that brand new car instead of continuing
>>>>to drive it even though it is no longer the latest and greatest, we
>>>>need to have the government programs on which to fall back. That
>>>>doesn't even address the fact that certain communities have a deficit
>>>>of such resources.
>>>>
>>>>At my own church, I am in charge of organizing local community service
>>>>activities. We have a solid core of people who give generously of
>>>>their time and energy and money, but there are others who are very
>>>>much occupied by the things in their own lives and they just don't
>>>>really contribute to anything. Fortunately, most will give to others
>>>>in some form, but there are a lot of causes and people out there to
>>>>give to. I am personally in my mid 20's and my peers are a notoriously
>>>>self-centered population. I know some people who meet that discription
>>>>and others who do not. Honestly, I don't know what you would need to
>>>>do in order to try and meet the needs of others. However, as a person
>>>>with my masters in counseling and with a lot of personal experience
>>>>working with people who are needy in both an emotional and physical
>>>>sense, itt is absolutely not as easy as giving them money for food
>>>>each month. Talk to me one on one if you want to know what it looks
>>>>like to try and quote unquote "help" someone with schizofrenia or a
>>>>personality disorder.
>>>>
>>>>In addition, I am currently taking a class on universal media design
>>>>at the local state university. The principles of the class have to do
>>>>with  making media and web sites accessible to everyone, whether they
>>>>are using an old computer on a dial up connection, using a smart
>>>>phone, the latest and greatest computer with whatever internet
>>>>browser, they are hard of hearing,  or a use a screen reader. Despite
>>>>its principles though, I have had to do a lot of self advocacy. They
>>>>have us learning about java script from on-line clips that do not
>>>>provide enough information for me to keep track of what is happening
>>>>in the visual part of the training. Someone asked me to give feedback
>>>>on the web site for the business association of downtown Denver in
>>>>preparation for the AHEAD conference here this summer. It is all in
>>>>flash, and I was unable to get any content off of it. The business
>>>>association doesn't feel particularly obliged to change their web site
>>>>at all, even if it also means that people out for the night cannot
>>>>pull up their site on a smart phone. The conservative principle is
>>>>that economic forces will convince them to change it, but they aare
>>>>not yet terribly interested. Along the same lines, the web sites at CU
>>>>are often times poorly designed to the extent of decreasing
>>>>accessibility, but as a whole group of sites are looking at being
>>>>redesigned in the next couple of years, the man in charge of it
>>>>doesn't know the first thing about concepts such as the W3 standards.
>>>>I met with him and showed him a bit about what makes his current site
>>>>that he manages difficult to navigate with a screen reader. Maybe he
>>>>will be motivated to learn more, butthus far people outside of
>>>>disability services at the university have been pretty apathetic with
>>>>regards to making accessibility improvements to sites. All of this is
>>>>just to say that I don't tend to find that the best ideas win out; too
>>>>many people are caught up in the concept of how things have always
>>>>been done and "it works for me, so it's fine."
>>>>
>>>>With all of this having been said, I vote we stick with putting
>>>>concepts out there without needing to label them as being part of one
>>>>group or another. I am all for innovation, change, and progress. No
>>>>political group gets to lay claim to those words and my use of them
>>>>does not put me in any one group.
>>>>
>>>>Amelia
>>>>
>>>>--
>>>>Amelia Dickerson
>>>
>>>
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