Someone try to justify this.

Yet corporate profits are at record levels.

 

Housing prices starting increasing from a trough in the 1990s, but there was no bubble until the early 2000s, as prices where well within normal historical fluctuation.

No one would have said we were in a bubble in 2000.

 

I see, so only the bad ole 1% got cheap cellphones, drugs from gene mapping, cheap computers, cheap tvs, cheap clothes, cheaper food, email, pandora, this forum and others like it, etc. etc. You plainly don't know what economic benefit is.

As stated, the bubble got it's start waaaay before 2000, and it did. That prices saw their steepest incline from 2000 is irrelevant as already dealt with.

 

No, the "bad ole 1%" as you call them got virtually all the growth in wealth and income.

 

Good for them and their employees, who likely own lots of the stock in their 401k plans. Look to globalization of many large U.S.companies to explain more of the disparity between their profits and the taxes they pay in the U.S. which are taxed lower than profits earned here.

@ thread This whole "justify this" thread reeks. Justify WHAT exactly? the lines on cherry-picked graphs that are endlessly circulated around the leftosphere by people who don't understand them, and certainly don't understand all the various context necessary to draw any meaningful conclusions from them?

Attempting conversations with leftists is worse than conversations with childen in some ways, At least children want to know "why, daddy?" with an open mind. Leftists come to the the table equipped with a scant handful of infinitely recycled datapoints amounting to fuzzy unicorn farts in the wind in terms of any causal relationships, and then wave them around like magic wands as if that amounts to some kind of argument. Children who've had too many poptarts sometimes do that in a sugar binge, but at least they calm down after awhile.

If I pulled down some chart of violent crimes committed by blacks v other races, as I'm sure pop up from time to time here, I'd be told, and rightly so, "well that's not the whole picture, there is necessary context missing." And those people would be right. OTOH, any old leftist chart with doctored, massaged outcome data not only carries the points on the graph with it, but somehow all these other implied abstract conclusions about justice, wealth formation, policy... without ADVOCATING ANY ACTUAL POLICY other than "rich people = bad, take more from rich people." That's not a very convincing policy, is it? Less regurgitated graph, more policy please lefties, the same old same old gets real old real fast.

 

Sorry, wrong.

 

you're quibbling.

 

Top 1% Got 93% of Income Growth as Rich-Poor Gap Widened
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-02/top-1-got-93-of-income-growth-as-rich-poor-gap-widened.html

It’s also important to remember that almost all of the growth in incomes over the last 30 years has gone to the top 1%, and its income has grown by 2.5x. Moreover, almost half of the growth in the top 1% has accrued within the top .1% over the last 30 years. Within that group, therefore, income and wealth have grown astronomically, especially over the last ten years.
http://acivilamericandebate.com/2011/04/10/the-30-year-growth-of-income-inequality/





- - - Updated - - -

Back at you.

The attempt to portray the housing bubble as occurring during Clinton's term to try to push blame on him is a common conservative tactic.

 

it's not a 'conservative tactic', it's honest analysis. You shouldn't shun that for a partisan agenda. The factors leading to the housing bubble, as well as the dramatic growth of housing prices, did not start under Bush. The factors leading to the housing bubble existed before Bush, and the bubble was forming before Bush - there's no point in denying facts unless you're pushing a partisan agenda.

And I don't know why you do that, you're not a politician. You have no gain in doing so, you're not going to actually convince anyone here by your ignoring the facts.

 

The majority of people are never interested in maximizing their potential. They are only interested in working hard enough to be comfortable. And most of those people are not interested enough in challenging their existing belief systems to actually grow into better and more productive people. So they waste their entire lives needlessly in mediocrity. It's not that you guys can't learn how to do more with your lives. It's that deep down you don't really want to. Because you are constantly filtering out everything that doesn't give you an excuse to keep doing things exactly as you are already doing them.

 

Regurgitated charts ignored.

As far as the Clinton administration's hand in the housing credit crisis, a few things:

1. Clinton unwisely continued a relaxation of the antitrust laws in favor of large banks that allowed for the biggest merger binge in banking history during the entire Clinton Presidency. Banks like First Union were gobbling up smaller banks left and right with almost no government scrutiny whatsoever by the antitrust bureaucracy we have paid billions for and continue to pay for. The damage was done in central decision committees assessing credit risk as opposed to local committees prior. Moreover, freshly minted cheap MBAs were sent to manage the new acquisitions, and small town bankers with ties in the community were outsourced. In short, a climate of unwise, uneducated credit decisions was created. The previous are facts, btw, not opinions, and not partisan spin. As for my opinion, Clinton left office millions and millions of dollars in debt, and surprise surprise, is a decamillionaire today. Draw your own conclusions.

2. The Clinton Admin began militant enforcement and reauthorization of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) a form of outcome based welfare where for every regular loan a bank made, they had to go into a "high risk" community and come up with a certain % of loans the bank normally wouldn't make. With local bankers pushed aside in favor of fresh cheap MBAs and central committees, the lending environment became, "don't worry about risk, just CRA, the loans are govt insured so they can clean up the mess." This continued throughout the 90s up to and through the GWB administration. But rest assured, it started with Clinton's aggressive CRA.

Not only were commercial banks subject to CRA, but the quasi govt "private" federal mortgage entities FMAC, FNMA (a whole other post could be dedicated to these entities) were as well. Bad idea.

3. 1996-1999 Brooksley Born, head of the CFTC at the time, begged the administration to regulate the off exchange derivatives markets, which would have led to greater regulation of mortgage derivatives and securitized debt generally. She was denied by the administration, Congress and the Fed. Now note at the time there were no regulations on these markets to speak of other than common law. Note also that during this time, the Long Term Capital fiasco occured, whereby that hedge fund grievously overleveraged itself with unregulated derivatives. Even then, Born was denied. She resigned near the end of the Clinton administration. Unregulated derivative use continued to grow explosively during the GWB administration, but it was the Clinton administration who rebuffed regulatory pleas and set the trend.

Now an aside on our ginormous preexisting securities regulatory bureaucracy, the SEC and its needless layers upon layers of byzantine regulations, which I have worked directly with, cost us billions and billions annually in compliance costs, and more importantly stifle the access of smaller companies to the capital markets (access to the capital markets, incidentally, is a key step in a company being able to pay their workers more). BigCo, govt's true constituency, keeps upstarts OUT to protect their elite entrenched true constituency. So why no regulation of the derivatives markets at all? NO GRAFT TO SELL, NO UPSTARTS TO KEEP OUT.

Readers, if you don't take anything else I'm posting seriously, take this. Regulations are only in place when they benefit govt and its graft engine, not -you- or only you tangentially almost by accident. The need for public safety, fairness, our children, whatever, is simply how they sell it to you.

4. Clinton repealed Glass Steagall with Gramm Leach Bliley. Yes he did. That effectively tore down the Chinese Wall between investment banking and commercial banking right around the time you had a) fresh untested bankers pushing CRA loans and other risky loans while b) banks were free to merge merge merge and get deeper into unregulated derivatives, all the while spurred on by an administration touting how robust and healthy the economy was! Loan money on a rubber stamp and you too can stimulate the economy into surplus... temporarilly.

OK so yes, the Clinton administration, like the Reagan, Bush I and all the previous administrations in the 20th century going all the way back to federal mortgage insurance had a hand in the recession/depression we still suffer from to this day. The Clinton administration did not start the problem, but was definitely responsible for setting some of the oiliest of the oily, graft-ridden rags. Do some research if you are interested in any particular admins illicit fiddling with the mortgage industry.

Despite all its lies and subterfuge, government, not merely some faceless Wall St. bankers, but govt and it's true elite, entrenched constituency (that yes includes corporations, but only a tiny fraction of the mostly honest businesses in this country) were the prime movers of the great recession.

And no, simplistic housing price charts, as much as the left would like it so in their haste to blame all the wrongs of the world on the GWB admin, tell almost nothing about what was really going on. It's like claiming dynamite with a hundred mile long fuse was just lit five seconds ago because it just blew up.

None of the above comes from other than my own experience and industry knowledge, believe the above or don't, and any obvious cut and paste from partisan sites of any soundbites or canned retorts will simply be ignored.

 

Oh my, a millionaire having to scrape by only a couple hundred thousand that year...cry me a river, homie.

 

Where I'm going with this is that when the economy is doing well the rich guys will get most of the gains cuz they have the most invested. And conversely when the crap hits the fan they'll get hurt the most for the same reason. I don't feel glad or sad for them or anyone else, that's just the way it is in a free market economy, or what passes for one in the US. You can get all emotional about it if you want, or moralize about the inequality of it all, but I don't believe that in today's world you can have good, sustained economic growth without having the big investors getting the most benefit. And if you try to redistribute that new wealth you risk losing capital that every economy requires to grow. The rich guys will put their money to work somewhere else, simple as that.

 

So you're saying if, in an economy comprised of say 1 super rich guy and 99 poor people, that's a good economy? Please explain, master of economics.

 

Well if the super rich guy was Bill Gates, and there were only 99 people to split the $40 billion of the Gates Foundation between, hell sign me up!

 

Happy to, master of twisting someone else's words around to mean something totally different. That is of course not even close to what I said; there is no mention in my post about what is or is not a good economy. What I talked about was economic growth, which first requires above all else capital. In today's economic reality, no business starts up or expands without investment, you have to have money to make money. AND, money will flow to where it makes the highest return, otherwise known as ROI, Return On Investment.

So, if you raise taxes on income and investment you are discouraging the very thing an economy needs to grow. That is because those with money to invest will put it to use offshore, or they will put it in asset classes that are not productive for the domestic economy, whatever gets them the most net income after taxes. Obviously, those with the most money to invest will receive the most capital gains from their investments. When the market goes up, as it did for most of the time between the 1980s and 2007, the guys with the most money invested got the most money back. When a recession comes along they take the biggest hit.

Liberals always complain about the rich guys, and how the repubs are only interested in helping the rich guys get richer. But nothing is further from the truth. The repubs actually want everyone else to get richer by increasing economic growth for everybody. The problem is that there is no way to do that unless the rich people get the biggest share of the new wealth. Like it or lump it, money is the lifeblood of every economy and those with the most money invested are going to be the ones who get the most benefit when the economy is growing.

 

So, a good economy involves moving money between people at the highest levels possible. As soon as you have money holed up in large quantities, you don't have a good economy. It's pretty simple. When money become stagnant at the top, the economy becomes stagnant with it.

 

Money doesn't get stagnant at the top if you incentivize investment in productive enterprises that grow the economy and create more jobs. Raising taxes does not assist in those endeavors.

 

Yes it does. It takes money that would be sat upon and put into programs that promote growth, such as infrastructure expansion to provide new places for businesses to exist.

 

Ah, I see. Gov't can do a better job of improving the economy than private enterprise can. Newsflash: gov't hasn't been doing too well at that over these past 5 years or so. Partly because it doesn't end up in the most advantageous places, it goes to political causes and cronies that help politicians get re-elected.

 

Government has been systematically dismantled by the moneyed interest in order to make it appear as you see it now.

It's not by accident. Get the money out of politics, see your government work for YOU again.

 

1. Way off topic.

2. Good luck getting money out if politics. Never happen, they'll always find a way to buy a politician.

3. Rich guys want to get richer. They make decisions based on profit rather than votes, which translates into more wealth. Granted most of it for them, but a rising tide lifts all boats. I know you don't like it, but there's no better way to help the less well off. I mean, look at how big gov't is now, how much has it grown since Reagan? And how much you guys complain about how the little guys and the middle class are getting screwed. How come you don't see the correlation?

 

Actually, there is a way. Maryland and New Hampshire are bringing up a constitutional convention for such a thing.

Here's a transcript for my interactions with NH representative:

Sirs and Madams,

It has been brought to my attention that you will have a chance to vote on HCR10 which if voted up would make New Hampshire the first state to call for a constitutional convention to get money out of politics. I urge you to vote this up and set an example for the rest of the states where such votes are in the process of being brought up soon. With money counting as free speech, and corporations being considered people that can exercise said free speech, we're dangerously close to a government run solely for business purposes and little more. The people's voices are washed out to a large degree by many media outlets sponsored by these companies, and if they're paying to get messages out on behalf of candidates too, then there's little room for anyone else in our representative democracy and in turn we technically couldn't even call it that anymore. Voting would just be a formality.

So please, vote to call for a constitutional convention. The federal level congress would have no say in the amendment so the states themselves could correct what the federal government has neglected to do and in some cases has embraced. It's hard to consider federal representatives 'public servants' anymore with the amount of money pouring in from unions and corporations alike to fund their campaigns, thus returning the favor for these special interests rather than listening to the voices of the population. This level of legalized corruption is already starting to move toward state and city level elections so we have to stop it now.

Thanks for your time on this matter and I trust you will do the right thing so that the other states, like my own (California), see a leader who's courageous enough to take the first step. It's that first step that's most important.

Sincerely,
Jeremy Landry
San Diego, CA

A reply by one of the reps, the mail was sent to all reps:

I represent the people of New Hampshire.

It is hypocritical for those of you out-of-state to interfere in our government while whining about the influence of corporations on politics.

If you are not a NH resident and are not planning to move here please remove me from your mailing list.

Jim Parison - NH State Representative


My reply:

I understand your position and respect it. However, it's a national matter to fix the federal government and requires interstate cooperation.

I'm just an ordinary guy concerned for the special interest influence in my country.

Thanks for taking time out to read my letter anyway. Thank you.



They're listening. The people taking the money are most against it.

 

You can go back and blame it on Adam if you want. There was no housing bubble until the early 2000s. There's no point in denying facts unless you're pushing a partisan agenda.

And I don't know why you do that, you're not a politician. You have no gain in doing so, you're not going to actually convince anyone here by your ignoring the facts.

 

LOL, the partisanship of your post can be illustrated clearly in your statement: "Clinton repealed Glass Steagall with Gramm Leach Bliley."

Gee, did you forget that the Republicans controlled Congress, and passed the law?

There was no housing bubble while Clinton was president. You can argue without proof that this or that lead to it, but there was no bubble while he was president that he should have addressed. The proof is the evidence you admit you ignore, simple because it doesn't support your partisan ideology

LOL, and you leave Bush2 and the Republicans off the list? You forgot to include the folks who were actually in charge while the housing bubble blew up to its absurd levels and then started imploding? Sure, your no partisan, are you? George "Mr. Ownership Society" Bush and the "Business can regulate itself" Republicans had nothing to do with it, did they?

In the midst of the unprecedented housing bubble, Bush promoted greater home ownership through his "ownership society" program. Here are some examples.

BUSH ADMINISTRATION UNVEILS NEW HOMEOWNERSHIP INITIATIVE
Martinez Announces $1000 Homebuyer Cash Back Incentive

http://archives.hud.gov/news/2002/pr02-075.cfm


“We can put light where there’s darkness, and hope where there’s despondency in this country. And part of it is working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home.” — President Bush, Oct. 15, 2002
White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/business/21admin.html?pagewanted=all

Bush drive for home ownership fueled housing bubble
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/business/worldbusiness/21iht-admin.4.18853088.html?pagewanted=all


American Dream Downpayment Initiative The American Dream Downpayment Initiative (ADDI) was signed into law on December 16, 2003. The American Dream Downpayment Assistance Act authorized up to $200 million annually. ADDI helped first-time homebuyers with the biggest hurdle to homeownership: downpayment and closing costs. The program was created to assist low-income first-time homebuyers in purchasing single-family homes by providing funds for downpayment, closing costs, and rehabilitation carried out in conjunction with the assisted home purchase.

http://www.hud.gov/offices/cpd/affordablehousing/programs/home/addi/

Bush Campaign Promotes Great American Dream
THE NATION Homeownership: The president's program aims to help people with low incomes, particularly Latinos and African Americans.
http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jun/16/nation/na-bush16


National Homeownership Month, 2005
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

More Americans than ever own their own homes, but we must continue to work hard so that every family has an opportunity to realize the American Dream. In 2002, I announced a goal to add 5.5 million new minority homeowners by the end of the decade. Since then, we have added 2.3 million new minority households. My Administration has also set a goal of adding 7 million new affordable homes to the market within the next 10 years. In my FY 2006 budget, I proposed a single family housing tax credit and two mortgage programs -- the Zero Downpayment mortgage and the Payment Incentives program -- to help more families achieve homeownership. In 2003, I signed the American Dream Downpayment Act, and I have proposed more than $200 million to continue the American Dream Downpayment Initiative to provide downpayment assistance to thousands of American families. By promoting initiatives such as financial literacy, tax incentives for building affordable homes, voucher programs, and Individual Development Accounts, we are strengthening our communities and improving citizens' lives. [/QUOTE]

+++

Bush's HUD relaxes rules on lending:

In 2000, because of a re-assessment of the housing market by HUD, anti-predatory lending rules were put into place that disallowed risky, high-cost loans from being credited toward affordable housing goals. In 2004, these rules were dropped and high-risk loans were again counted toward affordable housing goals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Mae

Bush' OFHEO, the WH agency responsible for oversight of Fannie you never heard of because you only look at right wing propaganda, dramatically increases the level of conforming loans. It increased the "conforming loan" limits from $252k in 2000 to $417k in 2007. This made it easier to get loans for more expensive houses and reduced the number classified as subprime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conforming_loan[/QUOTE]

Here, from 2002, is President George W. Bush, saying Freddie is “dismantling barriers” to help more people have home ownership, how “deserving families who have bad credit histories” can own homes, and that “the low income home buyer can have just as nice a house as anybody else.”

http://www.alan.com/2010/10/27/flas...wnership-for-those-with-bad-credit-histories/

The affordable housing goal levels set by the WH thru HUD:

42% 1997-2000
50% 2001-2004
52% 2005
53% 2006
55% 2007
56% 2008

http://research.stlouisfed.org/conferences/gse/Weicher.pdf page 5.


Meanwhile, at the time when greater regulatory oversight was needed amid the greed fueled housing bubble speculative frenzy, we had the "business can regulate itself" Republicans in charge of the government.

We saw how great that worked. And now they want to cut regulations again. What's a great recession once in a while if you can make billions in between, right?