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I'm sorry rilla but that is a crummy article
I get it – people are angry. Very, very angry. I’m angry too. And Wall Street sure makes a great scapegoat, hence the Occupy Wall Street protest. Wall Street is a symbol of the “greed and corruption” that took over America and caused this whole mess.
Ivory tower douchebags gonna ivory tower
In 1997 Andrew Cuomo, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Bill Clinton, allowed Fannie Mae to reduce the standards by which they would secure loans. This helped create the entire subprime category. Was this a bad thing? Of course not – it allowed more people to leave the ghetto, move to the suburbs, and achieve the American Dream of owning a home. Who knew that “Dream” would turn into a nightmare in a mere decade. Cuomo is not Nostradamus. We can blame him of course, but he had good intentions despite the negative results.
Standard corporatism blaming the government for accepting their bribes
We can blame the Federal Reserve of course. They lowered interest rates after the dot-com bust so much that there was no way for anybody to achieve safe, steady returns using conservative investments like bonds. Everyone — you, me, retirees — wanted higher returns for their 401(k) and pension plan. So we went to the banks and said, What can we do? And the banks said, Well, you’re the ones asking for higher yields, so here it is. And they bundled together all the newly made subprime mortgages into mortgage-backed securities (MBS) so that the average guy could finally get some yield since the Federal Reserve was blocking all other alternatives. So if you want to occupy the Federal Reserve, go to Washington, D.C. Of course, they had good intentions too. They wanted people to stop buying bonds and start buying stocks. And it worked! Until it didn’t.
The Federal Reserve is privately owned, and one of the biggest examples of corporatocracy we have today. It is the banks, it is run by Wall Street, and it should be destroyed
And what about the banks who bundled together these mortgage-backed securities? I don’t know, you and I asked for those securities through our 401(k) plans. So they were just responding to demand, right?
Fine, so what about the hedge funds. Suddenly they saw these mortgage-backed securities yielding 10% and immediately bought them up. They were greedy! But weren’t they just trying to find safe returns for their investors? Either way, the hedge funds aren’t on Wall Street. Go occupy Greenwich, or Park Avenue — but not Wall Street.
But then investment banks like Lehman saw what the hedge funds were doing, and they started doing it too: scooping up as much yield as they could, risk be damned! Greed! Again though, this was a handful of CEOs, many of whom have been fired from their jobs. I’m not trying to apologize for them. But let’s make sure our anger is pointed in the right direction.
Every protest/movement starts somewhere and small
Which now brings me to the biggest culprits yet: the accountants! Right in the middle of all of this mess, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) changed GAAP accounting rules so that you could no longer mark a mortgage-backed security according to your own statistical analysis. You had to start marking it down as soon as there were the slightest defaults and the paper started trading at lower values (this is called mark-to-market). Which meant that hedge funds trading in these illiquid securities could make just a few trades involving a hundred thousand dollars or so, and suddenly trillions of dollars would be wiped out of the value of the banks. Hedge funds gleefully took advantage of this accounting rule change, and tons of bank equity was wiped out. Once FASB changed the rule back (April, 2009) the banks (and all stocks) went straight up.
This guy doesn't know what a corporate oligarchy is
But how about this: You’re to blame too. That’s right, you.
Oh fuck off. Blame the worker bees for not being a queen bee. Blame the masses for acting exactly as econ predicts they act, then blame them for the greed of the special. Fantastic, and it wouldn't be worth mentioning except people buy this shit
What about Germany? What about Greece? What about the White House? President Obama has so confused the healthcare system, and created such confusion around mandatory payments from corporations that everyone is now afraid to hire. Two trillion dollars in stimulus and we’ve lost millions of jobs. How can that be? Guess what: there’s also $2 trillion in cash sitting in reserves at the banks. It never hit the money supply!
lol get this clown out of here
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OccupyWallStreet
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Originally Posted by BooG690
