- CheeseSpawn
- Sep 15, 2004
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Doctor Rope
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i'm in the industry and i'm gonna stop you right there and say that you have no idea what the gently caress you're talking about.
were there homes foreclosed on where there was basically no documentation/proof? yes. but those were outliers in the group. usually it was a case where both the servicer and the borrower knew what was up but since the servicer couldn't prove it they were SOL. the majority of the loans that were robo-signed would've been proper so long as they didn't have a robot doing it.
a lot of money went into fixing the problems around documentation and robo-signing with lots of nasty downstream effects that didn't get play in the press because they were ideology neutral. things like the FHA taking a massive bath on its insured properties because its lenders were unable to foreclose for years and so instead of getting a house in mostly good condition, they got a house 2 years later that was a hole in the ground. that ends up costing the government a lot of money since the FHA is now unable to sell the home and has to write off the asset as a total loss. if that happened even a few times it's a multi-million dollar loss to the government and i know that it happened a lot more than "just a few times"
nothing is simple. anyone saying all the problems in america are caused by X and if we just did Y things would be fine have a child-like understanding of the economy. poo poo's complicated and casting heroes and villains will make you feel good but won't solve any problems.
Do you want to talk about the effectiveness of HAMP while you're at it?
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Jan 1, 2017 04:55
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May 29, 2024 21:21
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- CheeseSpawn
- Sep 15, 2004
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Doctor Rope
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Dude, his campaign slogan was "Hope and change" and he'd supported single payer in the past. It was hardly unreasonable to think he'd be at least a little more progressive than he turned out to be. Plus his campaign did very little to correct this misconception, which was kind of a dick move.
"In other statements, Obama has spoken favorably of single-payer in concept, but always adding qualifiers."Obama's advertising and marketing was quite brilliant that it won awards. With a campaign like that at the time of the recession, it's easy to project Obama as some sort of leftist savior. The wake up call came quickly when Obama started to name his cabinet picks.
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Jan 28, 2017 06:02
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- CheeseSpawn
- Sep 15, 2004
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Doctor Rope
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Just dropping some easy Ha-Joon Chang reading in the thread.
Exposing the Myths of Neoliberal Capitalism: An Interview With Ha-Joon Chang posted:
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As for the other myths and lies about capitalism, the most important in my view is the myth that there is an objective domain of the economy into which political logic should not intrude. Once you accept the existence of this exclusive domain of the economy, as most people have done, you get to accept the authority of the economic experts, as interlocutors of some scientific truths about the economy, who will then dictate the way your economy is run.
However, there is no objective way to determine the boundary of the economy because the market itself is a political construct, as shown by the fact that it is illegal today in the rich countries to buy and sell a lot of things that used to be freely bought and sold -- such as slaves and the labor service of children.
In turn, if there is no objective way to draw the boundary around the economy, when people argue against the intrusion of political logic into the economy, they are in fact only asserting that their own 'political' view of what belongs in the domain of the market is somehow the correct one.
It is very important to reject the myth of [an] inviolable boundary of the economy, because that is the starting point of challenging the status quo. If you accept that the welfare state should be shrunk, labor rights have to be weakened, plant closures have to be accepted, and so on because of some objective economic logic (or "market forces," as it is often called), it becomes virtually impossible to modify the status quo.
Austerity has become the prevailing dogma throughout Europe, and it is high on the Republican agenda. If austerity is also based on lies, what is its actual objective?
A lot of people -- Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Mark Blyth and Yanis Varoufakis, to name some prominent names -- have written that austerity does not work, especially in the middle of an economic downturn (as it was practised in many developing countries under the World Bank-IMF Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s and the 1990s and more recently in Greece, Spain and other Eurozone countries).
Many of those who push for austerity do so because they genuinely (albeit mistakenly) believe that it works, but those who are smart enough to know that it doesn't still would use it because it is a very good way of shrinking the state (and thus giving more power to the corporate sector, including the foreign one) and changing the nature of state activities into a pro-corporate one (e.g., it is almost always welfare spending that goes first).
In other words, austerity is a very good way of pushing through a regressive political agenda without appearing to do so. You say you are cutting spending because you have to balance the books and put the house in order, when you are actually launching an attack on the working class and the poor. This is, for example, what the Conservative-Liberal Democrats coalition government in the UK said when it launched a very severe austerity program upon assuming power in 2010 -- the country's public finance at the time was such that it did not need such a severe austerity program, even by the standards of orthodox economics.
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What is your professional opinion of Donald Trump's proposed economic policies, which clearly embrace neoliberalism and all sort of shenanigans for the rich but oppose global "free-trade" agreements, and what do you expect to happen when they collide with Ryan's austerity budget?
Mr. Trump's plan for American economic revival is still vague, but, as far as I can tell, it has two main planks -- making American corporations create more jobs [at] home and increasing infrastructural investments.
The first plank seems rather fanciful. He says that he will do it mainly by engaging in greater protectionism, but it won't work because of two reasons.
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Feb 10, 2017 18:46
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Jan 1, 2017 04:55
