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GEMorris posted:This right loving here. Ah, so you're saying you *chose* not to starve.
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Jul 9, 2017 23:41
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If only more people chose to eat the rich.
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Jul 10, 2017 00:29
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GEMorris posted:This right loving here. Did you go out and buy a house because your wife was bitten by a snake as Cerebral Bore seems to think people do? Because I'm having some difficulty seeing the connection between subprime mortgages and all these events that forced you into debt. If the original argument was that borrowers have no moral responsibility for the crisis because they are forced to borrow, then at least one of you should have some reason why people taking mortgages had no choice.
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Jul 10, 2017 06:28
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Geriatric Pirate posted:If the original argument was that borrowers have no moral responsibility for the crisis because they are forced to borrow, then at least one of you should have some reason why people taking mortgages had no choice. fyi at least in German law there is an assumed bound of rationality for borrowers, and the law protects irational borrowers from being taken advantage of i.e. the law knows that there are people that don't know how to borrow so they can pay the money back (and from personal experience this is a constant and can happen to anyone) if you have a law that doesn't do this you wind up with the subprime crisis (which btw led to Greece's problems, it wasn't Greece's borrowing) Goa Tse-tung fucked around with this message at 08:52 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 08:49
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I too don't understand why the trained professionals in the field are more responsible for the loans they give out than the random people who take out those loans.
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Jul 10, 2017 10:37
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Because this is a Just World and if people could just be poor because of circumstances that would mean that I, the
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Jul 10, 2017 10:41
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Goa Tse-tung posted:fyi at least in German law there is an assumed bound of rationality for borrowers, and the law protects irational borrowers from being taken advantage of The US has very strong protections against misleading borrowing. The crisis still happened. The EU had rules in place to stop Greeces borrowing. The crisis still happened. The laws argue that a small minority of people get misled, not that most people taking loans are unaware of what they're doing. You're doing the Guardian thing of taking something that could plausibly affect maybe 1 or 2% of mortgage borrowers and extrapolating it to the entite population, most of whom took mortgages willingly while being as reasonably informed as can be. Futuresight posted:I too don't understand why the trained professionals in the field are more responsible for the loans they give out than the random people who take out those loans. Edit: that's not to mention that the biggest risks with mortgage lending are typically related to borrowers having more info about their repayment ability than lenders, not vice versa. Of course lenders bear responsibility for not screening borrowers adequately, but to solely blame banks instead of a mix of policy makers, borrowers and lenders is just he typical knee jerk "hurrrr banks!!!" reaction Geriatric Pirate fucked around with this message at 11:13 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 10:49
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Actually let me tell you about how I totally see poor people as
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Jul 10, 2017 10:53
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Is "People deserve anything that happens to them" really the line you want to go with here?
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Jul 10, 2017 11:18
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Orange Devil posted:Is "People deserve anything that happens to them" really the line you want to go with here? Kill all humans, maximise suffering 
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Jul 10, 2017 11:35
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Geriatric Pirate posted:So you're saying that as long as you interact with someone more competent than you in any field you're completely devoid of agency and any responsibility? And how does this work in the context of Greece, where a sophisticated government borrowed from less sophisticated pension funds and savers, including through fraud? People should be able to trust in licensed lenders the same way they should be able to trust in licensed food vendors. If you wilfully withhold relevant information from a lender then whatever that's your fault and your problem, but you should be able to trust that a loan is good if a lender is willing to lend to you after given full knowledge of your situation. The same as you should be able to trust that food sold to you is safe. And that there isn't lead paint on your kids' toys. Etc. The person selling the thing needs to be the one to analyse it for suitability and safety. We can't expect every person to be an expert in every field, so we expect the people in each individual field to be experts in theirs instead and put responsibility on them. Additionally, the biggest risk to a mortgage might be the borrower having more information, but a single mortgage isn't going to lead to systemic failure. It's basically impossible for a single person outside of the financial industry to cause any harm beyond themselves as even a complete write-off of their loan will be lost in the noise. Plus, bad loans are not a systemic problem if they are correctly assessed and used appropriately by the financial industry. There's nothing inherently wrong with any risk profile so long as it fits your investment strategy. The problem wasn't a bunch of sub-prime loans, the problem was the mischaracterisation of those loans and their derivatives. It allowed/caused banks to misjudge their risk and leverage behind much weaker assets than they appeared in the balance sheets and caused pension funds and whatnot to purchase assets much riskier than they wanted. This narrative of blaming sub-prime borrowers for the crash is both morally and factually wrong. Also yeah, gently caress Greece, but the Greek people had very little control over what happened. If you could somehow punish a state without punishing its people then I'd be all over that. But you can't. And as much as we pretend our governments are democratic they are very much not, and people have very little power, and thus responsibility, over what their governments do unless they're in government. Futuresight fucked around with this message at 11:51 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 11:44
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Geriatric Pirate posted:The US has very strong protections against misleading borrowing. The rules in place are only as good as the degree to which they get enforced. But the global financial crisis showed that Regulation and supervision of the banks failed at all levels. The Bush administration was not at all interested in protecting borrowers from predatory lenders, which is how you got e.g. Wells Fargoo systematically pushing minority borrowers into subprime loans. State courts were not interested in protecting borrowers, which is how you got the phenomenon of foreclosure mills. Geriatric Pirate posted:The crisis still happened. The EU had rules in place to stop Greeces borrowing. The crisis still happened. The laws argue that a small minority of people get misled, not that most people taking loans are unaware of what they're doing. Daniel Kahnemann got the Nobel Prize in Economics for experimental research showing that people are in fact systematically and predictably irrational in all sorts of ways when it comes to economic behaviour. The problem of greed, of course, was discovered far earlier than that. Those affected by these shortcomings include even people who really should know better. Yes, people can be greedy and stupid, which is why it is the job of bankers to tell them they can't have what they want. Bankers failed entirely, and systematically, in doing so because, surprise!, they were greedy and stupid too, and they could dump the risk of non-repayment on some foreign pension fund by packaging up their loans into CDOs . The GFC was not caused by poor people wanting to buy bigger houses than they could afford. It was caused by the Fed pumping far too much cheap money into a system where people could keep up with the Joneses only by borrowing, and by the financial industry taking advantage of a complete absence of prudential supervision. So given how hard firms at all levels in the financial industry worked to profit off from people, from the mortgage originators handing out loans that could never be repaid, to the investment banks packaging these into CDOs, to the rating agencies stamping these with AAA-ratings, to the financial geniuses offloading their risks to others with credit-default swaps, to the Bush administration and Congress turning a blind eye to this because campaign donations, the moral blame to be assigned for the crisis to individual borrowers should be very, very, very, far down the list.
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Jul 10, 2017 12:22
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Futuresight posted:People should be able to trust in licensed lenders the same way they should be able to trust in licensed food vendors. If you wilfully withhold relevant information from a lender then whatever that's your fault and your problem, but you should be able to trust that a loan is good if a lender is willing to lend to you after given full knowledge of your situation. The same as you should be able to trust that food sold to you is safe. And that there isn't lead paint on your kids' toys. Etc. The person selling the thing needs to be the one to analyse it for suitability and safety. We can't expect every person to be an expert in every field, so we expect the people in each individual field to be experts in theirs instead and put responsibility on them. Thanks for the logical answer btw. Refreshing. In terms of responsibility - people should be able to trust lenders to not defraud them but just like food vendors don't have a responsibility to tell you you're getting fat, lenders don't have a responsibility to ensure that a client uses the funds for something wise. This is slightly complicated by the fact that in general, incentives are aligned (lenders want borrowers to use the money on something wise so they too can get repaid) and often banks will have something similar to a fiduciary obligation because they also take deposits and sell investments, but I don't see why it's a bank's responsibility to tell any individual that they're underestimating their own income risks for example. What is suitability in lending, anyway? Should a bank be rejecting customers who have solid credit and want to buy a house if the bank feels that the housing market is overvalued? I mean for reasons outside of their own credit risk, that is. It's a bank's job to make sure that the borrower understands things like variable interest rates and discloses all the fees, but the bank is not responsible for telling someone that they might not want to take a personal loan to expand a really dumb business idea, because it's the individuals own choice. A simple example related to this is what if someone with extreme risk aversion comes to a bank and requests a fixed rate mortgage in a place where most loans are floating rate? If issuing a fixed rate mortgage is super costly compared to floating rates, should the bank tell the person that there is a 95% chance that the floating rate will never exceed the fixed rate or facilitate what the client wants? My view is that the bank's responsibility ends when both options are explained to the client without any fraud or obfuscation. You're right about the 2008 crisis and why risk is not the endo of the world. But you could just as well apply the same logic to any individual bank (i.e. any individual bank should be allowed to take risks that might cause it to fail) and then blame regulators and ratings agencies. In the end though everyone had bad incentives. Borrowers have an incentive to take as much debt that they wouldn't normally qualify for, mortgage originators had an incentive to originate as much as possible, ratings agencies had an incentive to rate stuff as highly as possible, lazy pension fund managers had an incentive to not do their homework and just trust the agencies. Pluskut Tukker posted:The rules in place are only as good as the degree to which they get enforced. But the global financial crisis showed that Regulation and supervision of the banks failed at all levels. The Bush administration was not at all interested in protecting borrowers from predatory lenders, which is how you got e.g. Wells Fargoo systematically pushing minority borrowers into subprime loans. State courts were not interested in protecting borrowers, which is how you got the phenomenon of foreclosure mills. The second link has some examples of inappropriate loans being pushed aggressively, which I agree is a problem. However, none of the examples mentions mortgages. I understand why someone might be "forced" to take on medical debt or debt to pay the IRS as an example (though bankruptcy is always an option). However, what is still missing is an example of why someone might feel forced to buy a house. It's a bit telling that no one has yet provided any kind of reasoning for why someone lacks agency when making a huge financial decision like that. quote:Daniel Kahnemann got the Nobel Prize in Economics for experimental research showing that people are in fact systematically and predictably irrational in all sorts of ways when it comes to economic behaviour. The problem of greed, of course, was discovered far earlier than that. Those affected by these shortcomings include even people who really should know better. Yes, people can be greedy and stupid, which is why it is the job of bankers to tell them they can't have what they want. Bankers failed entirely, and systematically, in doing so because, surprise!, they were greedy and stupid too, and they could dump the risk of non-repayment on some foreign pension fund by packaging up their loans into CDOs . quote:The GFC was not caused by poor people wanting to buy bigger houses than they could afford. It was caused by the Fed pumping far too much cheap money into a system where people could keep up with the Joneses only by borrowing, and by the financial industry taking advantage of a complete absence of prudential supervision. So given how hard firms at all levels in the financial industry worked to profit off from people, from the mortgage originators handing out loans that could never be repaid, to the investment banks packaging these into CDOs, to the rating agencies stamping these with AAA-ratings, to the financial geniuses offloading their risks to others with credit-default swaps, to the Bush administration and Congress turning a blind eye to this because campaign donations, the moral blame to be assigned for the crisis to individual borrowers should be very, very, very, far down the list. Geriatric Pirate fucked around with this message at 12:48 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 12:41
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blowfish posted:Kill all humans, maximise suffering Kill all humans, minimize suffering 
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Jul 10, 2017 12:59
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Orange Devil posted:Is "People deserve anything that happens to them" really the line you want to go with here? I know that on the blessed day that the bankers and their lobbyists will be carted off to the guillotine under the cheer of the crowd, everything that happens then will be fully deserved.
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Jul 10, 2017 13:17
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Geriatric Pirate posted:What is suitability in lending, anyway? Should a bank be rejecting customers who have solid credit and want to buy a house if the bank feels that the housing market is overvalued? I mean for reasons outside of their own credit risk, that is. It's a bank's job to make sure that the borrower understands things like variable interest rates and discloses all the fees, but the bank is not responsible for telling someone that they might not want to take a personal loan to expand a really dumb business idea, because it's the individuals own choice. A simple example related to this is what if someone with extreme risk aversion comes to a bank and requests a fixed rate mortgage in a place where most loans are floating rate? If issuing a fixed rate mortgage is super costly compared to floating rates, should the bank tell the person that there is a 95% chance that the floating rate will never exceed the fixed rate or facilitate what the client wants? My view is that the bank's responsibility ends when both options are explained to the client without any fraud or obfuscation. Of course banks should consider rejecting customers with solid credit in an overvalued housing market, because it means the collateral on their loan is likely to lose value. People might be good credit risks now but they can die or get sick. Of course they should also reject people for personal loans to expand a dumb business idea, because it means the loan will likely not be repaid. I'm not even expecting banks to act as moral agents here; I'm expecting them to act in their own enlightened self-interest and do their loving job. Geriatric Pirate posted:Your first link makes no mention of Wells Fargo at all or banks "forcing" (or even aggressively marketing. edit: there is a bit about banks having sales targets and mis-selling yield spread loans to customers, fair enough. but I wonder how prevalent this was in the wider picture) mortgages to people who shouldn't have got them. Instead it talks about how lending standards were relaxed. This is not an example of anyone being forced to take a loan, this is an example of loans being made to people who want them but should not get them. So then the question is: Whose "fault" is it? Neither the lending bank nor the borrower had the right incentives to screen borrower quality. I am not arguing that people were 'forced' to take out loans in the sense that bankers put guns to people's heads and made them sign on the dotted line. If that's your understanding of 'force' then I should probably stop arguing with you. Anyway, plenty of people took out bigger loans than they should have, in the entirely mistaken expectation that housing prices would rise forever. However, there are simple and entirely innocent explanations for why people might feel forced to buy a house: namely, you have to live *somewhere*, there might not be houses available for rent at any affordable price or without being on a waiting list for a decade, you're moving somewhere for work or you're moving in together with your partner, or you have a kid on the way and you need a place big enough to start a family in, and besides, the mortgage advisor you're talking to tells you that it's entirely affordable, that prices are still rising so you'd be stupid not to be buying now and invest in your future, and hey, you can always flip your house before the principal comes due, and also, the government gives you a nice tax break on your mortgage bill if you buy a house instead of renting. Long story short, people wanting to buy houses is an entirely normal and predictable phenomenon, so complaining about people wanting to buy houses is as useful as shouting at the clouds for raining on you. So if Joe Blow wants to buy a house, you end up with a business deal where on one side you have a bank, which is in the business of deciding who is a good credit risk, and which for the purpose of making good loans employs mathematicians, economists, econometricians, finance people, statisticians, actuaries, lawyers , marketeers, and salespeople, all of whom do that work on a daily basis, and on the other side you have Joe Blow, who's unlikely to have had any serious training in personal finance, and who is likely to be signing a mortgage for the first time in his life, then if the deal goes bad and Joe Blow is unable to make even his first principal repayment, you better believe I will blame the 'bankers' first, second, third and fourth, and then the regulators for allowing this stuff to happen, and then the politicians who allowed themselves to be bought by the banks. At some point I will also yell at Joe Blow that he's an idiot, perhaps. But people making stupid economic decisions, particularly during a bubble, is as old as time itself. If the management of money however is your profession, and you get paid a shitload of money for doing so, you're going to be held to a higher standard. You can claim that the blame should be shared but then it should be something like 95% one way and 5% the other or whatever. Anyway, I linked to stories on Wells Fargo, which was just one example, and other scandals in my previous post.If you're interested in finding out how much the misbehaviour of the financial industry contributed to the mortgage market meltdown, I can recommend reading the full US Senate Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report which is actually eminently readable despite being over 700 pages. Pluskut Tukker fucked around with this message at 14:01 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 13:54
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Do ratings agencies have a responsibility to not rate total loving garbagefires as AAA securities? What about the banks leveraging their market position by demanding those AAA ratings on poo poo they know is garbage or else taking their business to a competing ratings agency? Do they have a responsibility to, you know, not do that? Because this is what literally happened. Products were offered on the market as 1 thing by both the offering party and a supposedly independent ratings agency while in fact they were an entirely different thing. Do you think maybe being able to sell hot garbage as a solid investment incentivised the banks to shovel as many people as possible into hot garbage mortgages? And do you think maybe they jumped on this opportunity to enrich themselves through what any reasonable person would conclude is both blatantly fraudulous and unethical? You know, just mmmmaaaaaybe?
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Jul 10, 2017 14:01
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Orange Devil posted:Do ratings agencies have a responsibility to not rate total loving garbagefires as AAA securities? https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/14/moodys-864m-penalty-for-ratings-in-run-up-to-2008-financial-crisis Well, Moody's paid 864m dollars for misrating, and S&P paid over 1bn, but of course there was no finding of wrong-doing or admission of guilt at the settlement. quote:In incriminating e-mail after incriminating e-mail, executives and analysts from these companies are caught admitting their entire business model is crooked. On the other hand, they tried an insane "well it's only an opinion and therefore protected by freedom of speech which makes us not liable for anything we say" defense that almost worked.
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Jul 10, 2017 14:11
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Orange Devil posted:Do ratings agencies have a responsibility to not rate total loving garbagefires as AAA securities? Yes, it is more or less their (only) business model.
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Jul 10, 2017 19:10
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Pluskut Tukker posted:Of course banks should consider rejecting customers with solid credit in an overvalued housing market, because it means the collateral on their loan is likely to lose value. People might be good credit risks now but they can die or get sick. Of course they should also reject people for personal loans to expand a dumb business idea, because it means the loan will likely not be repaid. I'm not even expecting banks to act as moral agents here; I'm expecting them to act in their own enlightened self-interest and do their loving job. quote:I am not arguing that people were 'forced' to take out loans in the sense that bankers put guns to people's heads and made them sign on the dotted line. If that's your understanding of 'force' then I should probably stop arguing with you. Anyway, plenty of people took out bigger loans than they should have, in the entirely mistaken expectation that housing prices would rise forever. However, there are simple and entirely innocent explanations for why people might feel forced to buy a house: namely, you have to live *somewhere*, there might not be houses available for rent at any affordable price or without being on a waiting list for a decade, you're moving somewhere for work or you're moving in together with your partner, or you have a kid on the way and you need a place big enough to start a family in, and besides, the mortgage advisor you're talking to tells you that it's entirely affordable, that prices are still rising so you'd be stupid not to be buying now and invest in your future, and hey, you can always flip your house before the principal comes due, and also, the government gives you a nice tax break on your mortgage bill if you buy a house instead of renting. I mean just because I have flawed expectations of the future doesn't mean I'm not capable of making decisions. There might be a bias in those decisions, but I am still actively making them. Let's say my expectation of the equity risk premium is 10% a year. Does that mean that I am not making a conscious choice when I invest in stocks? quote:Long story short, people wanting to buy houses is an entirely normal and predictable phenomenon, so complaining about people wanting to buy houses is as useful as shouting at the clouds for raining on you. So if Joe Blow wants to buy a house, you end up with a business deal where on one side you have a bank, which is in the business of deciding who is a good credit risk, and which for the purpose of making good loans employs mathematicians, economists, econometricians, finance people, statisticians, actuaries, lawyers , marketeers, and salespeople, all of whom do that work on a daily basis, and on the other side you have Joe Blow, who's unlikely to have had any serious training in personal finance, and who is likely to be signing a mortgage for the first time in his life, then if the deal goes bad and Joe Blow is unable to make even his first principal repayment, you better believe I will blame the 'bankers' first, second, third and fourth, and then the regulators for allowing this stuff to happen, and then the politicians who allowed themselves to be bought by the banks. At some point I will also yell at Joe Blow that he's an idiot, perhaps. But people making stupid economic decisions, particularly during a bubble, is as old as time itself. If the management of money however is your profession, and you get paid a shitload of money for doing so, you're going to be held to a higher standard. You can claim that the blame should be shared but then it should be something like 95% one way and 5% the other or whatever. quote:Anyway, I linked to stories on Wells Fargo, which was just one example, and other scandals in my previous post.If you're interested in finding out how much the misbehaviour of the financial industry contributed to the mortgage market meltdown, I can recommend reading the full US Senate Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report which is actually eminently readable despite being over 700 pages. If the argument is that people were somehow forced, tricked or pressured into taking mortgages they couldn't afford then surely some statistics on that exist. Because right now what this seems like is that the ex ante realization was bad so you assume the mortgage was mis-sold, which is ridiculous. People are completely capable of making bad decisions without pressure (and it's not a bank's job to stop you). Geriatric Pirate fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 19:14
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Geriatric Pirate posted:Yeah, poor people have to take mortgages to live, don't you know anything about the real world? You're a right oval office.
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Jul 10, 2017 19:27
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Orange Devil posted:Do ratings agencies have a responsibility to not rate total loving garbagefires as AAA securities? Great insight, you totally owned whoever said the ratings agencies and banks should bear no responsibility
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Jul 10, 2017 19:32
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Junior G-man posted:On the other hand, they tried an insane "well it's only an opinion and therefore protected by freedom of speech which makes us not liable for anything we say" defense that almost worked. It looks preceding reasonable if you read it, and I'm sure it was written with the very best and noblest of intentions, but a couple hundred years of American lawyers have made their first amendment look like a really stupid piece of poo poo.
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Jul 10, 2017 20:02
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The positive thing about absolute cunts like GP is that they really do honestly and openly profess the real ideology of the right. None of that clinton or blairite obfuscation of actual beliefs in gentle language of toleration and... Whatever bullshit that Blair was always going on about. Something about "we are the new radicals a labour party modernized" or whatever. Just plain, open and simple 'gently caress the poor' with callous self-justification through pretentions of cold rationality and superiority. Which is utterly repulsive to everyone with any kind of moral compass or basic human emotions. I can only hope that GP is a real higher up in Kokoomus and speaks publically about his ideals as often as possible in official capacity as a Kockhead politician. I truly do pray to Allah that they make GP the party head, as soon as possible. I pray furthermore that as many people like him as possible join the Kok and other rightist parties and publically profess his ideals. Insha'Allah GP and truly honest people like him become the public face of as many rightist parties as possible throughout Europa. So I must say, and I never thought before I would say so, thank you GP. May you live a long and very publically visible life. You should consider writing your ideas down, maybe a book or just try the opinion pages of newspapers. Just make sure to say you're a Kok member and publically associate yourself with them at all possible instances.
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Jul 10, 2017 20:55
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Geriatric Pirate posted:Great insight, you totally owned whoever said the ratings agencies and banks should bear no responsibility I'm still answering the questions "why do people hate bankers" and "why do people blame bankers selling poo poo masquerading as a good mortgage and/or securities deal more than they do the schmucks they sold it to?" which is apparently something being debated. By morons. Such as yourself. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 23:25
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lollontee posted:The positive thing about absolute cunts like GP is that they really do honestly and openly profess the real ideology of the right. None of that clinton or blairite obfuscation of actual beliefs in gentle language of toleration and... Whatever bullshit that Blair was always going on about. Something about "we are the new radicals a labour party modernized" or whatever. Just plain, open and simple 'gently caress the poor' with callous self-justification through pretentions of cold rationality and superiority. Which is utterly repulsive to everyone with any kind of moral compass or basic human emotions.
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Jul 11, 2017 06:34
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Geriatric Pirate posted:How about instead of that, you tell me where an estimate of the value of mortgages that were sold to people who probably didn't want a mortgage? I know that's a difficult number but these anecdotes (none of which concern mortgages yet btw, still waiting) are not a substitute for statistics. No, I'm not going to fall any further into this trap of debating the merits of particular mortgage transactions and the financial probity of any particular homeowner or even chasing any further statistics and links for you when the crisis was systemic. Systemic crises have systemic causes. If people were too willing to take out mortgages, that was because mortgages were offered too cheaply, because of cheap money and the collapsing lending standards. But that was only one of the many causes, because the willingness of banks to sell Alt-A mortgages or no-doc liar loans to people was predicated on their ability to securitise them and sell them to institutional investors. So going on about the blame due greedy/stupid homeowners is just a red herring. You have supplied no evidence whatsoever to counter the extensive evidence that the financial industry failed at all levels, from mortgage origination, to securitization, to credit rating, to the sale of RMBS. It doesn't even matter if the selling of inappropriately structured or overly high LTV mortgages occurred on a large enough scale to cause the crisis, because the misbehaviour occurred on a large enough scale to be worthy of condemnation by itself. So I'm just going to quote the FCIC report conclusions in chapter 7 on the mortgage machine at you: quote:The Commission concludes that the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve,
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Jul 11, 2017 08:53
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Geriatric Pirate posted:Yeah, I'm sure "be prudent about debt" won't resonate at all with people (Finnish or otherwise) but "I am forced to buy a house because a one hour commute is too long and it's a human rights violation to live outside of central Helsinki and I don't like my landlord, more money please" will be a resounding success. It'll resonate with rich cunts for exactly as long as the (largely non-voting) exploited aren't presented with an alternative to being assfucked by your kind. TINA works until it really, really doesn't. You can dismiss the people and what they feel is just and unjust if you so decide. You can even justify that to yourself with this objectivist bullcrap about free will and aromized individualism. But that won't make the people feel like they live in a just society. And then all it takes is someone who has an idea of a different kind of world. Jezza is thw boy is he's gonna gulag your smug bourgeoisie rear end. I'll send you a postcard.
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Jul 11, 2017 11:03
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I like how the goalposts now have moved to "people should be prudent about debt" when we're literally discussing a case where the banks were deliberately decieving people.
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Jul 11, 2017 11:40
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Pluskut Tukker posted:No, I'm not going to fall any further into this trap of debating the merits of particular mortgage transactions and the financial probity of any particular homeowner or even chasing any further statistics and links for you when the crisis was systemic. Systemic crises have systemic causes. If people were too willing to take out mortgages, that was because mortgages were offered too cheaply, because of cheap money and the collapsing lending standards. But that was only one of the many causes, because the willingness of banks to sell Alt-A mortgages or no-doc liar loans to people was predicated on their ability to securitise them and sell them to institutional investors. So going on about the blame due greedy/stupid homeowners is just a red herring. That's because I think the financial industry shares the blame. But the point is that many people here don't think that people should be responsible for the mortgages they took because they were apparently forced into taking them. So it's similar to my fast food analogy - just because it's cheap doesn't mean you are forced to eat.
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Jul 11, 2017 12:51
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IT is when the choice is between eating fast food and starving.even if eating only fast food all the time will kill you.but thats ok people will just bootstrap themselves from the hostel/homelesness if they really want it,and those who dont are too lazy.i dont see the problem of poor people living three hours away from the only place that may employ them as poor people have no social or Family lives really.its not like a lot of things require you to have a fixed residence or anything.i mean the gypsies do fine in their roving bands and are of c ourse well regarded members of society.well i must hurry now got to catch the train to galts gulch see ya!
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Jul 11, 2017 13:22
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Geriatric Pirate posted:just because it's cheap doesn't mean you are forced to eat. you realize that ARMs were marketed like hard drugs right? teaser rates etc means you can, as a bank, lie to borrowers and promise them that they can afford the loan
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Jul 11, 2017 13:30
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Geriatric Pirate posted:The difference is that Joe Blow knows about his own personal financial situation whereas an econometrician can model a fraction of it. That's worth a ton. Despite all that you read in the media hyping up fintech, a model trying to predict individual default based on simple demographic characteristics that lenders have doesn't work that well. Again you're focusing on individual loans too much. Banks don't really lend based on an individual's finances, they lend based on what their models say about that individual's finances. If people tend to leave out certain important information to the point that it's relevant at a systemic level, then that effect would be represented in the models. If an individual does something not represented in the models then it's not common enough to cause a systemic problem. This makes it literally impossible for the actions of the average person to matter on a systemic level, which is the level we're talking about. Anything they could do is literally always either too small an effect to matter or is already accounted for. Provided the financial industry is doing it's job of course. Futuresight fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Jul 11, 2017 |
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Jul 11, 2017 14:04
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Goa Tse-tung posted:you realize that ARMs were marketed like hard drugs right? teaser rates etc means you can, as a bank, lie to borrowers and promise them that they can afford the loan If only there had been people who've been saying "don't trust the rich" over and over again for a hundred years or so oh wait people just chose not to believe them just because they also said the Soviet Union is pretty great.
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Jul 11, 2017 14:10
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In fact it's time we return to the pre-consumerism model of society, where people lived mostly from subsistence farming and never took any sort of credit. They built everything they needed by themselves, and only bought the few things they couldn't produce on their own. There was a lot less waste, so it's the environmentally conscious thing to do. As a bonus, this would cause a complete and total collapse of worldwide economy as instead of growth you'd get a very violent shrinking. That'd make all the dogmatic discussion about how and why debt is always bad very funny.
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Jul 11, 2017 14:39
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There really is no point in arguing with either GaussianCopula or Geriatric Pirate. They're just utterly lost causes.
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Jul 11, 2017 14:40
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Junior G-man posted:There really is no point in arguing with either GaussianCopula or Geriatric Pirate. They're just utterly lost causes. That's a very nice way of writing 'irredeemable cunts'.
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Jul 11, 2017 15:04
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Junior G-man posted:There really is no point in arguing with either GaussianCopula or Geriatric Pirate. They're just utterly lost causes. On the contrary, debating with them (really debating, not just throwing insults) often produces the most valuable content of this thread.
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Jul 11, 2017 18:54
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Geriatric Pirate posted:That's because I think the financial industry shares the blame. But the point is that many people here don't think that people should be responsible for the mortgages they took because they were apparently forced into taking them. So it's similar to my fast food analogy - just because it's cheap doesn't mean you are forced to eat. Well sure, but you could have thrown this accusation too at the 17th-century Dutchmen spending their life savings on tulip bulbs or the 18th-century Englishmen and Frenchmen getting caught up in the South Sea Company bubble or the schemes of John Law . Or, more recently, most of the population of Albania falling for pyramid schemes in the 1990s, or the dot.com bubble of that time. And, of course, the 2000s housing bubble, or any of the other crises documented for instance by Reinhart & Rogoff for the last 800 years. People are persistently stupid with money, no matter their level of education. That's essentially an unfixable problem, so it's of very limited use to blame them. By now, it should also be clear that it's an entirely foreseeable problem. Give enough people access to cheap credit, and the consequences will inevitably be disastrous. Moreover, people get punished, *hard*, when they take out mortgages they can't afford, even when the main reason they can't afford it is beyond their control. Foreclosure is horrible, and in the US it happened to close to ten million homeowners between 2006-14, with millions more left in stress because their mortgage went under water as a result of the crisis. And of course there has been amazing misery in the eurozone periphery. But while many in the financial industry lost their job during the crisis, very few people in the financial industry were punished for their misbehaviour. So holding people responsible is a mostly pointless endeavour. You're not going to change them. If you want to stop them from taking out irresponsible mortgages, raise the interest rate. However, with the knowledge accumulated over the years, there are rules we have learnt we can impose on the financial industry (though it's obviously a work in process) to limit their ability to blow up the economy. But that industry is far more organized and powerful than Joe Blow the individual homeowner, and can influence or help write the rules they have to live by, and entice regulators to be gentle to them by the promise of the revolving door-job. So it's far more important to make very clear exactly how much 'the banks' are to blame for the crisis.
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Jul 11, 2017 20:48
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Pluskut Tukker posted:Well sure, but you could have thrown this accusation too at the 17th-century Dutchmen spending their life savings on tulip bulbs or the 18th-century Englishmen and Frenchmen getting caught up in the South Sea Company bubble or the schemes of John Law . Or, more recently, most of the population of Albania falling for pyramid schemes in the 1990s, or the dot.com bubble of that time. And, of course, the 2000s housing bubble, or any of the other crises documented for instance by Reinhart & Rogoff for the last 800 years. People are persistently stupid with money, no matter their level of education. That's essentially an unfixable problem, so it's of very limited use to blame them. By now, it should also be clear that it's an entirely foreseeable problem. Give enough people access to cheap credit, and the consequences will inevitably be disastrous. An even more recent example from several European countries is mass taking credit in Swiss Franc. Interest is low, Franc is stable, right? Boom, Franc goes up in 2015. Suddenly thousands of people can't make the payments any more and they also now owe more than what they borrowed, despite the fact that they had repaid half the debt.
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Jul 12, 2017 00:18
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