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| Posted: 04 Dec 2009 21:50 |
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employers cut the fewest number of jobs since the recession began. The government also said 159,000 fewer jobs were lost in September and October than first reported.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Unexpected-drop-in-jobless-apf-4164 ...
The article makes it sound like this is really great, but I'm having a hard time getting too excited till we actually have a month where jobs or added or at least no jobs lost. This isn't exactly super news. It's like saying this month I only lost a finger instead of a arm like last month. Shew!
__________________Lucas McCain the Rifleman: A man doesn't run from a fight, Mark...but that doesn't mean you should go running *to* one, either.
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| Posted: 07 Dec 2009 18:34 |
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Well, it's like this, if you are falling through a grinder, it is a pretty good day when all you lose is a finger.
Our Economy has been put through a grinder due to the actions of probusiness antigovernment randian capitalist, and now that we're finnally seeing a slow down to the damage, it is a cause for some positive hope that this long nightmare of deregulation and the societal failures it creates could be at an end.
Of course there are still those that think that less government (even as our economy burned) would have solved the problem. That we just had too many people watching the fat cats, and had they not been there, our economy would have been fine.
Such thinking disassociated as it is from reality is common among politicians whose bread is buttered by these same business forces. Unfortunatly for the rest of us, we get tossed into the grinder. One hopes that the congress will turn off the grinder in comming months, and perhaps even establish some system for treating the injuries we have sustained.
Now you may now make mention of the Bailout (Bushes Bailout by the way) without looking at the situation that caused such a bailout to be necessary. Such disassociation from reality is exactly the cause of these economic problems.
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| Posted: 07 Dec 2009 18:59 |
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I'm pretty sure it was the government's involvement that helped start this mess to begin with. If it was wasn't for the government pushing banks to loan to people that couldn't afford the home loans this wouldn't have been near as bad.
__________________Lucas McCain the Rifleman: A man doesn't run from a fight, Mark...but that doesn't mean you should go running *to* one, either.
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| Posted: 07 Dec 2009 19:58 |
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Actually, what caused the mess was banks not being obligated to hold onto the debts they incurred, essentially a failure of the state to impose rational limitations on banks.
Once banks no longer needed to absorb the risk of a loan, they suffered the moral hazzard that they began giving riskier and riskier loans, because the market was wiling to absorb it.
A better government system would have limited the ability of banks to expose themselves in this way.
The State encourageing banks to make bad loans is bad government, but truthfully, the banks didn't need the encouragment once they no longer had to hold onto the debts themselves. If the state had required more prudence on thier part, more skin in the game, then the whole mess might have been avoided, or at least limited.
Unfortunatlye bankers are as prone to irrational exhuberance as anyone, and might have made the assumption that many did that home values only go in one direction.
It is here that a better state system keeping an eye out for precisly this sort of problem would have avoided the issue. Unfortunatly, the "government is the problem" meme has been so ingrained, and the gravy train was running so fast at the time, that no one thought to suggest the emporer had no clothes.
See that's the thing, the state can be wrong, just as the banks can be wrong, and when they are wrong in concert, it makes for a big mess. But that's where we dust ourselves off, and try again and try not to make the same mistake, and are grateful that there is a big enough player like the state to keep our economy together through this dark time, and hopefully get us out the other end.
There are a lot of reasons to be hopeful about these monthly numbers, they aren't great, but they may well be part of the shift back to job growth. I highly doubt that without the stimulus, and the bailout, and every other effort made by the state after the collapse, that these numbers would be starting to turn the corner. Had we had another Hoover in the Whitehouse, we certainly would be far worse off than we are today.
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| Posted: 09 Dec 2009 19:47 Last Edited By: Tim |
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See that's the thing, the state can be wrong, just as the banks can be wrong
You ever hear the old saying too many chiefs and not enough braves? Too many cogs in the wheel, etc Leave the bank alone. Let it loan money out to who they think they can get money back from. Let nature take it's course.
__________________Lucas McCain the Rifleman: A man doesn't run from a fight, Mark...but that doesn't mean you should go running *to* one, either.
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| Posted: 09 Dec 2009 21:13 |
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Tim, the problem is, if a bank loans money, and then sells the loan, the bank no longer has skin in the game. As such the bank is going to do as much as it can to manufacture loans to sell, since it doesn't have to worry about getting paid back.
See Tim, finance is a very complex game where essentially all the players are trying to cheat each other. The only way you can have it work is to have rules to the game.
Have you ever studied economic history? If not you should, the economic systems of the world did not spring fully formed from the head of Karl Marx, they are the result of many many failed attempts at free markets, which resulted in booms and busts and recessions and depressions up until the great depression.
You have no idea how close you came to selling apples on the street corner last year Tim, and how close we came to much much worse things, all because no one was making sure those who were regulating themselves were doing so honestly.
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| Posted: 10 Dec 2009 18:38 |
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So you believe the government had nothing to do at all with the banks loaning money to nonqualified buyers. Barney Frank had nothing to do with it?
Don't buy that.
We just don't pay taxes to have Barney Frank telling banks what to do. Or Bush or anybody else.
__________________Lucas McCain the Rifleman: A man doesn't run from a fight, Mark...but that doesn't mean you should go running *to* one, either.
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| Posted: 10 Dec 2009 19:49 |
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And what law was it that said banks had to loan to unqualified persons?
Just curious.
I have made very clear that the government had a hand in the failure (artificially low interest rates for example was probably a contributing factor to th eventual meltdown) but to shift blame away from the bankers who knowingly gave the loans, and the private rating agencies that happily went along with the fraud is just ridiculous.
A hand full of low income residents in a few major cities (those people whom banks were "pressured" to lend to) is not what drove the economy under. It was rampant speculation and bad investment with no oversight by the government to realize that this was a bad set of dominos we were setting up.
It's easy to blame the urban dwellers, and I know that is the reactionaries first resort, but the fact is, the failure came from the banks, and the governmnet failure wasn't over regulation, but a lack of regulation.
Unless you can show me exactly how "the government" "pressured" "the banks" (all adequately vauge terms)and how that alone lead to this debacle I will have to say you are just ignoring the facts.
With out the repeal of glass Steagle, without the manufactor of exotic asset classes, without the failure to regulate credit default swaps, without the blindness of bankers and rating agencies, this economic collapse doesn't occur.
I'll even give you that this "presure" added fuel to the fire (at least as much as low interst rates) but to think that this alone was the cause is just foolish.
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| Posted: 12 Dec 2009 00:18 |
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I tell you what I'll call your bluff in the interest of me not having to research for 20 minutes. Why don't you prove to me the government could actually do something or anything right other than provide for the common defense.
__________________Lucas McCain the Rifleman: A man doesn't run from a fight, Mark...but that doesn't mean you should go running *to* one, either.
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| Posted: 12 Dec 2009 00:26 |
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I do have one more thing to say. The thing to keep in mind is the government running things is basically politicians running things. Do you trust politicians to set standards? I don't. I don't trust a politician to do anything but grab power and money for themselves. Therefore I do not want them screwing with any financial institution. That's like putting a fox in the hen house.
__________________Lucas McCain the Rifleman: A man doesn't run from a fight, Mark...but that doesn't mean you should go running *to* one, either.
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| Posted: 12 Dec 2009 13:30 |
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That's like putting a fox in the hen house.
You're almost a century late on that one. 96 years, almost to the day.
__________________But the backdrops peel and the sets give way and the cast get eaten by the play, there's a murderer at the matinee, there are dead men in the aisles
And the patrons and the actors too are uncertain if the show is through and with sidelong looks await their cue, but the frozen mask just smiles
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