Quote from Pa(b)st Prime:
You had booms and busts way before central banks, before the advent of mortgage "derivitives", hell you had massive land busts back when people paid cash.
Actually, this is not necessarily true. The best example you can point to is the Tulip bubble, which when researched, had derivatives & options at the core of the issue, which exacerbated the greed mania. Another issue is that rarely does any book or account on it point to what happened to the wealth that changed hands. It did not just dissapear. Who left the country with it? That's where the really interesting details lie.
Booms & bust, especially on a local level have happened for thousands of years. The history of the term "money changers" is something always worth researching. Those are the pre-cursors to the central bank concept.
Guy's like you are the same type who said "excess speculation from 10% stock margins caused the crash." Now there's stock crashes of 85% or more with 50% margins.
Uhm what? I never said nor will I ever say that. Margins were being contracted by the elite players at the same time, which started the collapse. Also, money supply charts speak volumes of how credit expansion & contraction does the trick.
When it comes to 10% stock margins, the real question is why would brokerages offer such margins to just about anyone.
So the new blame is on mortgage derivitives. Yet except for Florida and Vegas the worst housing markets in the country are those that had LITTLE speculative buying. Was Detroit flipper heaven?
Do you, at all, understand Level III assets and how they were used to make more leverage available? Re-read my post. Then try to understand exactly why giving out mortgages that would never be repaid was so profitable.
Speculative buying was all over the nation, leaving out long degenerated areas like Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgs alone. But it is far from just Florida & Vegas, as much as you choose to believe otherwise.
There's been a HUGE AMOUNT of liquidity apart from leveraged. Just look at baseball salaries. Or teachers and GM pensions. Or the net worth of exchange members vis a vis their stock IPO's. It's that massive influx of cash and the credit it creates that causes from era to era capital to chase assets well above their value equilibrium. There's also a seller for every buyer and a transactional zero sum aspect of asset fluctuations. And I won't even get into how the depression we're in is effecting global regions with scant credit apparatuses in place.
Yes I'll repeat-discussions like these-bullshit that Congress and the media SPECIALIZE in-are simplistic exercises because the causation is more rooted in investment psychology than in economics. Clearly regulations and interest rate policy effect decision making but the fact remains most people will misjudge risk in seek of gain. That should be obvious. This board personifies the point. Fewer than 1 out of 10 people here will ultimately trade successfully yet fully 100% of ET'ers THINK they'll be in that 10%. Why would you believe faulty, misguided optimism in performance is confined to ET?
Frankly, it's obvious. You just don't get it. You do not even try to understand. I tried to give a summary of how the scheme worked. I thought it was simple enough. Does it get more complicated? Yes, because the structuring of AAA paper required cooperation from rating agencies, appraisers, realtors and mortgage brokers. But the scheme at the core is the same exact thing it has been for thousands of years.
There is another way to try to open up your eyes. There was an article, relatively ignored by mass media (for good reasons), where an ex Wamu loan officer discussed a situation where he was instructed to approve loans that were an obvious default waiting to happen. Hmmm. Reminds me of the tech bubble where analysts were taking companies IPO that were an obvious bankruptcy case within 12 months. If they voiced their concerns, the MDs would just tell them to not worry about it.
Now let's look at the current executives being labeled as incompetent & stupid & clueless. Why is it that they are walking away with millions upon millions while the nation is impoverished?
Is it really just "faulty, misguided optimism in performance"? Or is it nothing more than a scam? I think it just depends on whether you want to see the truth or keep deluding yourself.