.
Version77: Maybe SA was abused by his parents when he was a child.
That could be part of his problem with America. America is like an authority figure to him, so he is mad as hell at America. He thinks he is being abused by the Americans. Especially the rich Republicans.
Hence his love and desire for the poor party, the Democrats...
********
June 29, 2007
SouthAmerica: You canât grasp things even when it is spelled out for you to understand from A to Z.
What makes America great it is not that you have 1 percent of zillionaries getting all the money as it has been the case for the last 30 years.
What made America great it is its middle class - shrinking middle class.
A healthy middle class save money, invest money, buys houses, cars, goes on vacations, and buys everything else that goes along with a good standard of living.
A sick and shrinking middle class buys houses, cars, goes on vacation, and buys everything else that goes along with a good standard of living â but they do it on credit alone.
The Republicans are wrecking this country in every way possible.
They believe in free market until they need a government hand out to bail them out from their reckless ways for example:
1) The big credit card companies handed out millions of credit cards to people who should not have had all that credit line because they most likely would not be able to pay it.
After all that credit went sour because of their reckless way of giving credit to people that they should not have extended credit â they asked the government to change the bankruptcy laws to bail them out from their stupidity.
2) Here we go again:
The New York Times - Editorial
âHousing and Hedge Fundsâ
Published: June 28, 2007
There may be a silver lining in the recent hedge fund debacle at Bear Stearns.
Until now, the deepest pain of the housing slump has been felt by hard-pressed borrowers, generally low-income homeowners stuck with unsuitable and even predatory subprime loans â adjustable-rate mortgages made to people with weak credit. As monthly payments have increased, the loans have become unaffordable, while falling housing prices and tougher credit terms have made them harder to refinance. Defaults and foreclosures have multiplied, but Congress has provided scant relief.
But now the pain is being felt by Wall Street. The two big Bear Stearns hedge funds that neared collapse last week were full of tricky investments tied to subprime mortgages. To try to ensure that hundreds of billions of dollars worth of similar investments donât also plummet, endangering the financial system, Congress may finally have to do more to help lower-end borrowers.
That, in turn, would prop up the investments based on their mortgages. Weâre all for helping distressed borrowers. And we accept governmentâs role, if necessary, to avert a financial collapse. But in the end, intervention on behalf of Wall Street would be an outrage, because Wall Street â abetted by lax federal regulation â is largely to blame for this fiasco. Wall Street firms encouraged the issuance of risky loans to troubled borrowers and then reaped a windfall by packaging them as investments for hedge fund clients.
And yet, the possibility of economywide problems from further Bear Stearns-like debacles is real. The Bear Stearns funds, like many others, borrowed big to invest in subprime loans. Investing with borrowed money juices returns in hot markets and magnifies losses in down markets, making losers out of lenders as well as equity investors.
One of the Bear Stearns funds borrowed some $6 billion, from Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and other powerhouses. For the other fund, Bear Stearns reportedly put up $3.2 billion to help liquidate holdings. Thatâs 32 cents on the dollar for assets once valued at $10 billion.
In the past two years, Wall Street firms have issued investments similar to the Bear Stearns holdings, worth about $500 billion on paper. If those were to tank, the damage could be felt broadly.
It would likely become harder, for instance, to get loans for everything from homebuying, which supported the economy for most of the decade, to leveraged buyouts, which have buoyed the stock market.
It should not be permitted for lenders, banks and hedge funds to risk everyoneâs economic well-being in their attempts to enrich the few. The country needs vastly better regulation than it now has. Mortgage lenders must be restricted to recommending loans that are reasonably within the borrowersâ ability to repay over time. Federal bank regulation must be streamlined and toughened to avoid a repeat of the disjointed and ultimately lax response to the reckless lending of the housing boom.
Hedge funds should be regulated if they accept pension money, because doing so exposes everyday Americans to outsized investment risks.
Regulation should also cover hedge funds with large sums of borrowed money. And the United States must embrace global coordination of hedge fund regulation, just as banking regulation is increasingly global.
In the coming year, interest rates on some $850 billion in mortgages are scheduled for their first increase. Over half of that is in subprime loans. That is the dangerous financial world we live in. It needs strong regulations.
********
If the Bush administration had at least a minimum of common sense they would protect the money invested in pension funds (which is secured by the US government) and would not allow the pension fund money to be invested in hedge funds, and private equity companies to chase the illusory high returns. (Just God knows what these firms are doing with the government insured pension money that they are using to gamble with).
In my opinion, the US government should not rescue any of these people who invested on these high-risk investments. They should pay the price of being wrong on their judgment regarding these investments.
The Republicans believe in welfare for the rich and US government bailouts for their stupidities and major mistakes and they do that over and over again.
Republicans are always looking for a free lunch.
By the way, we have very wealthy people in the United States who also have common sense such as George Soros, and Warren Buffet just to mention a few. (They have one thing in common - they are both Democrats).
.
Version77: Maybe SA was abused by his parents when he was a child.
That could be part of his problem with America. America is like an authority figure to him, so he is mad as hell at America. He thinks he is being abused by the Americans. Especially the rich Republicans.
Hence his love and desire for the poor party, the Democrats...
********
June 29, 2007
SouthAmerica: You canât grasp things even when it is spelled out for you to understand from A to Z.
What makes America great it is not that you have 1 percent of zillionaries getting all the money as it has been the case for the last 30 years.
What made America great it is its middle class - shrinking middle class.
A healthy middle class save money, invest money, buys houses, cars, goes on vacations, and buys everything else that goes along with a good standard of living.
A sick and shrinking middle class buys houses, cars, goes on vacation, and buys everything else that goes along with a good standard of living â but they do it on credit alone.
The Republicans are wrecking this country in every way possible.
They believe in free market until they need a government hand out to bail them out from their reckless ways for example:
1) The big credit card companies handed out millions of credit cards to people who should not have had all that credit line because they most likely would not be able to pay it.
After all that credit went sour because of their reckless way of giving credit to people that they should not have extended credit â they asked the government to change the bankruptcy laws to bail them out from their stupidity.
2) Here we go again:
The New York Times - Editorial
âHousing and Hedge Fundsâ
Published: June 28, 2007
There may be a silver lining in the recent hedge fund debacle at Bear Stearns.
Until now, the deepest pain of the housing slump has been felt by hard-pressed borrowers, generally low-income homeowners stuck with unsuitable and even predatory subprime loans â adjustable-rate mortgages made to people with weak credit. As monthly payments have increased, the loans have become unaffordable, while falling housing prices and tougher credit terms have made them harder to refinance. Defaults and foreclosures have multiplied, but Congress has provided scant relief.
But now the pain is being felt by Wall Street. The two big Bear Stearns hedge funds that neared collapse last week were full of tricky investments tied to subprime mortgages. To try to ensure that hundreds of billions of dollars worth of similar investments donât also plummet, endangering the financial system, Congress may finally have to do more to help lower-end borrowers.
That, in turn, would prop up the investments based on their mortgages. Weâre all for helping distressed borrowers. And we accept governmentâs role, if necessary, to avert a financial collapse. But in the end, intervention on behalf of Wall Street would be an outrage, because Wall Street â abetted by lax federal regulation â is largely to blame for this fiasco. Wall Street firms encouraged the issuance of risky loans to troubled borrowers and then reaped a windfall by packaging them as investments for hedge fund clients.
And yet, the possibility of economywide problems from further Bear Stearns-like debacles is real. The Bear Stearns funds, like many others, borrowed big to invest in subprime loans. Investing with borrowed money juices returns in hot markets and magnifies losses in down markets, making losers out of lenders as well as equity investors.
One of the Bear Stearns funds borrowed some $6 billion, from Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and other powerhouses. For the other fund, Bear Stearns reportedly put up $3.2 billion to help liquidate holdings. Thatâs 32 cents on the dollar for assets once valued at $10 billion.
In the past two years, Wall Street firms have issued investments similar to the Bear Stearns holdings, worth about $500 billion on paper. If those were to tank, the damage could be felt broadly.
It would likely become harder, for instance, to get loans for everything from homebuying, which supported the economy for most of the decade, to leveraged buyouts, which have buoyed the stock market.
It should not be permitted for lenders, banks and hedge funds to risk everyoneâs economic well-being in their attempts to enrich the few. The country needs vastly better regulation than it now has. Mortgage lenders must be restricted to recommending loans that are reasonably within the borrowersâ ability to repay over time. Federal bank regulation must be streamlined and toughened to avoid a repeat of the disjointed and ultimately lax response to the reckless lending of the housing boom.
Hedge funds should be regulated if they accept pension money, because doing so exposes everyday Americans to outsized investment risks.
Regulation should also cover hedge funds with large sums of borrowed money. And the United States must embrace global coordination of hedge fund regulation, just as banking regulation is increasingly global.
In the coming year, interest rates on some $850 billion in mortgages are scheduled for their first increase. Over half of that is in subprime loans. That is the dangerous financial world we live in. It needs strong regulations.
********
If the Bush administration had at least a minimum of common sense they would protect the money invested in pension funds (which is secured by the US government) and would not allow the pension fund money to be invested in hedge funds, and private equity companies to chase the illusory high returns. (Just God knows what these firms are doing with the government insured pension money that they are using to gamble with).
In my opinion, the US government should not rescue any of these people who invested on these high-risk investments. They should pay the price of being wrong on their judgment regarding these investments.
The Republicans believe in welfare for the rich and US government bailouts for their stupidities and major mistakes and they do that over and over again.
Republicans are always looking for a free lunch.
By the way, we have very wealthy people in the United States who also have common sense such as George Soros, and Warren Buffet just to mention a few. (They have one thing in common - they are both Democrats).
.
