June 6, 2011

Gretchen Morgenson's "Reckless Endangerment"

My VDARE column reviews the new book Reckless Endangerment on the origins of the mortgage meltdown by Gretchen Morgenson of the NYT and financial analyst Joshua Rosner.

By Steve Sailer on 6/06/2011 Labels: , ,

81 comments:

eh said...

OT (mostly, but speaking of financial/economic 'endangerment'...)

An excerpt from the testimony of Charles Blahous before the House Ways & Means committe last Friday:

Social Security expenditures exceeded the program’s non-interest income in 2010 for the first
time since 1983. This deficit stood at $49 billion last year and is projected to be $46 billion in
2011. This deficit is expected to shrink to about $20 billion for years 2012-2014 as the economy strengthens. After 2014, cash deficits are expected to grow rapidly as the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers.
The 2011 Trustees’ report is the first in which Public Trustees have ever participated to have
concluded that an era of permanent annual deficits has been reached (assuming no future change in law).

Emphasis added.

Further commentary here.

6/6/11, 2:38 AM
Anonymous said...

One of the most pernicious and dangerous features of Palin is her clinical refusal to understand reality, to accept error, to acknowledge when the facts she has cited are not actually facts, but delusions. And her vanity and pathologies are so deep she will insist that black is white until her minions actually find a source to prove it.

She's dangerous; she's shrewd; she's an exhibitionist. But she is also, we must keep reminding ourselves, a farce. What worries me about this political leader incapable of telling fantasy apart from fact is that, in a long and deep recession, someone who can lie that readily and manipulate religious and cultural resentment as well as she does is a danger. Not just to America, but to the world.

6/6/11, 6:38 AM
Anonymous said...

Everything is a proxy to bash minorities for you isn't it?

6/6/11, 6:49 AM
Anonymous said...

"Two Cheeks of the Same Ass".

It is the effective duopoly of power in the USA, which alternates between Republican and Democrat (but ignores the real meat of poltics), that enabled the whole sorry crisis to engender in the first place, and will probably have further crises awaiting in its rectum to poop out and spoil the party.
You se, unlike the cold, civilized austere nations of northern Europe (but not, significantly the UK which doesn't cut the mustard), the USAdoes not have a system of proportional reprresentation in place, and thus as any student of political science will tell you is stuck with a system tailored to benefit politicians and not the wishes of the elcetorate.
'Race' is the nexus where the inequities embedded in first-past-the-post are only too apparent.Quite frankly the Democrats want uncontrolled immigration as a vote farm.The Republicans advocate it for its inherent cheap labor - beholden as they are to the filth and trash at the WSJ and 'The Economist'.
The status quo benefits both sets of politicoes.So, ergo, it is carved in stone and nothing, but nothing that Steve or all of his 'little people' say and do will change it - even if half of the economy, quite obviously, falls over a cliff because of it.
Not only are both wings of the political class singing its praises in unison, but big business (and I mean BIG BUSINESS, it doesn't come bigger than Goldman Sachs and the rest of the corporate looters, men who can buy dirty politicians for breakfast)wants it - so it's here for good.
Tough titty Stevefans.
You've been 'done up like a kipper*' as the Cockneys used to say.


"Two Cheeks of the Same Ass".

*Kipper - a filleted and flattened out smoked Herring, formerly popular in England as a breakfast meal.

6/6/11, 6:59 AM
Irishman said...

"Morgenson won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her coverage of Wall Street for the NYT. She had previously been a reporter at Forbes, where she did so well that her colleague, Peter Brimelow, now Editor of VDARE.com, made a bet that she would be Forbes’ editor one day. (This didn’t happen, and Forbes appears on the edge of extinction)."

Forbes is going out of business? Pray tell some more please.

6/6/11, 7:32 AM
Anonymous said...

Great review. But this I don't get:

"Democrats are now supposed to assume that government can’t be corrupt because it’s government and therefore, by definition, good. Republicans are supposed to assume that for-profit companies can’t be corrupt because they are policed by the magic of the market.

Morgenson, who is for both honest, effective business and for honest, effective regulation, cleverly gets around these contemporary prejudices ..."

After studying the mortgage meltdown, how can anyone be for honest, effective regulation? How can anyone even consider honest, effective regulation possible?

6/6/11, 9:18 AM
none of the above said...

Anon:

Minorities were the props in this play. The evil characters were the crony capitalists and their cronies, who worked out how to use pretend-concern for low minority home ownership rates as a way to justify doing obviously-dumb things that made them rich, with a taxpayer guarantee covering them.

Many of the people (of whatever race) who got loans they couldn't really afford with terms they didnt understand got screwed to the wall--their life savings gone, a financial millstone around their necks, ruined credit, etc. But who cares if a few props get broken--it's not like real people (the rich and powerful) are getting hurt.

In a more just world, these guys would be intimately familiar with what tar and feathers does for the complexion.

6/6/11, 9:49 AM
Anonymous said...

Biggest Sarahgate since Jared Loughner.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/06/sarah-palin-says-paul-revere-warned-the-british.html

The Sarahssment by MSM continues.

6/6/11, 10:05 AM
Anonymous said...

"One of the most pernicious and dangerous features of Palin is her clinical refusal to understand reality, to accept error, to acknowledge when the facts she has cited are not actually facts, but delusions. And her vanity and pathologies are so deep she will insist that black is white until her minions actually find a source to prove it."


OMG, are you claiming Sarah Palin is a liberal? Wow, you coulda fooled me.

6/6/11, 10:10 AM
Larry, San Francisco said...

Countrywide was especially sleazy. They had bought up my original mortgage. When rates went down they called me up to suggest I refinance. I thought that makes sense so I agreed. They then charged me $300 to create a loan agreement. They left me with the impression that was the fees that they were going to charge which seemed reasonable to me (yes, I was an idiot). However, when I received the loan paperwork I found it included charges of 2.5 points! At that point, I started calling up mortgage brokers that my friends recommended and got a reasonable deal. I wonder if that was just the standard deal they gave to the math phobic.

6/6/11, 10:25 AM
Luke Lea said...

I really first-rate article/review, an oustanding example of why other journalists secretly regard you as one of America's best. I'll link it around.

6/6/11, 11:26 AM
Stuff Black People Don't Like said...

"So we’re still waiting for the book that will give us the inside story on the Bush Bust—the Republicans’ catastrophic 2000s—and its contribution to the Crash of 2008."

Why don't you write it Steve? You've produced ample material at Takimag, Alternative Right, Vdare, and your blog.

Who else do you think is going to write it?

6/6/11, 12:24 PM
jody said...

GW bush, one of the bottom 5 presidents of all time. the chimp left us many gifts that keep on giving. it's interesting talking to republican voters about this kind of thing and watching them go into full GW bush defense mode. oh, and 5 more americans killed in iraq today. thanks for that too, G-dub. or obama, as the case may be.

6/6/11, 12:25 PM
Henry Canaday said...

One crude measure of the relative contribution of the government housing agencies and the investment banks to the financial crisis is the net bailout money the government will not recover from the agencies and the banks, the latter including the AIG exposure. By that measure, it is looking increasingly like a mostly government-manufactured disaster.

6/6/11, 12:49 PM
SF said...

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20069435-503544.html

O/T So Anthony Weiner is married to a muslim raised in Saudi Arabia who was formerly alleged to have a lesbian relationship with Hillary Clinton. If his district reelected him after that, what's the big deal about a little sexting?

6/6/11, 2:06 PM
Thripshaw said...

James A. Johnson is one of the best examples of how fraudulent the concept of "public service" has become. Lining his pockets with over $100 million while working for a quasi-governmental entity is beyond outrageous. The whole D.C. influence peddling racket is rotten to the core.

I hope Morgenson's book gets the attention it deserves.

6/6/11, 2:07 PM
Elbrac said...

OT

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chibrknews-northwestern-chicago-police-warn-about-mob-action-attacks-20110604,0,7878457.story

I think 'teens' across the cities are beginning to realize that SWPLs are easy targets. They may even sense that SWPL liberals who voted for Obama are too 'guilt-ridden' to do anything about black crime. SWPL may have voted for Obama to send a positive message to the black community, but the 'teen' elements just feel this country now belongs to them. We have mini-Johannesbergs all over.

6/6/11, 2:40 PM
Anonymous said...

Fannie's actions were destructive, but it's not the arch villain in this story. It plunged into the subprime market much LATER than the investment banks in an attempt to recapture market share. By the way it's a little crazy when conservatives blame government mandates for loans that at the time were very profitable. The attention of Fannie is just a GOP attempt to deflect blame.

6/6/11, 2:45 PM
Anonymous said...

Fannie should go back to the model that worked so well for 30 years of being a boring yet efficient government run entity that pays its executives in the six figures rather than eight or nine figures, which buys and holds mortgages. Making it for-profit with huge executive compensation meant its leaders would only care about the next big bonus rather than its long term future.

6/6/11, 2:49 PM
Anonymous said...

"One crude measure of the relative contribution of the government housing agencies and the investment banks to the financial crisis is the net bailout money the government will not recover from the agencies and the banks, the latter including the AIG exposure. By that measure, it is looking increasingly like a mostly government-manufactured disaster."

Okay, but make sure the accounting is correct. If the Fed prints money and gives it to Wall Street at 0.3% and then an investment bank loans it back to the treasury through buying a bond at 3%, it doesn't make much sense to say we've even. The Wall Street welfare queens aren't rich because they're good at making anything. They're rich because we printed money and handed it to them after they ran their companies into the ground through criminality and stupidity.

6/6/11, 2:54 PM
glib, facile n snarky said...

"Why don't you write it Steve? You've produced ample material at Takimag, Alternative Right, Vdare, and your blog.

Who else do you think is going to write it?"

I concur. I must have missed the Bush II analysis being on an extended vacation in Europe and all. So you could rehash it here to get those of us who were otherwise occupied up to speed.

Plus, I have no idea what a "green eye shade Republican" is.

Back to working on my tan on my current beach vacation...

6/6/11, 3:26 PM
headache said...

Steve covered the AA angle very early on, but it took criminal elements on WS to exploit that. A good source on the technical side of the mortgage meltdown is nakedcapitalism.com.

6/6/11, 3:34 PM
Anonymous said...

"The Fed prints money and gives it to Wall Street at 0.3%"

How exactly does that work? Do you mean the discount window operation?

6/6/11, 3:40 PM
Gene Berman said...

Anonymous @ 6:38 AM

I know Freudian-based psychiatric theory is no longer de rigeur but it sounds like you've got a deep-seated case of p---- envy fer sure!

6/6/11, 3:48 PM
Gene Berman said...

Pernicious! Dangerous! Clinical refusal (what the hell does that mean?)! Delusions, vanity, and pathologies!

Get a grip, man. At least get it settled in your own mind that she's deluded and bat-shit crazy (as your first paragraph indicates you believe) or that she's some super-cleverly lying combination of Machiavelli, Rasputin, and
Satan rolled into one.

Next time, you might even deign to share with the rest of us at least one of those world-destroying lies.

6/6/11, 4:04 PM
Whiskey said...

Sarah Palin rose to prominence by taking on the Oil Companies and Political Establishment in Alaska of both parties over the issue of royalty payments and their disbursement. Palin argued (and rode that argument into the Governorship) that royalties had to be higher, that the oil companies through kickbacks had consistently under-reported payments, and that further the royalties belonged in direct payouts to all Alaskans instead of graft-ridden infrastructure projects in what amounts to an arctic wilderness. All that from the background of a small-town mayor.

That's fairly remarkable. As opposed to the wheels greased for an AA baby, who has never had to produce or face hardship, and who is now known as "he made it worse."

6/6/11, 4:18 PM
Truth said...

Steve, you may be the most beattin'-a-horse-ta-def, Negro I've met in my 45 years of life.

6/6/11, 4:29 PM
airtommy said...

By the way it's a little crazy when conservatives blame government mandates for loans that at the time were very profitable.

All loans start out profitable. It's only after a period of time that the bad loans turn out to be unprofitable.

Any bank can boost its profits for a few years by lowering its lending standards and increasing the amount it lends out. Ultimately, this will lead to bankruptcy for the bank.

6/6/11, 4:59 PM
Luke Lea said...

None of the above comments: "Minorities were the props in this play. The evil characters were the crony capitalists and their cronies, who worked out how to use pretend-concern for low minority home ownership rates as a way to justify doing obviously-dumb things that made them rich, with a taxpayer guarantee covering them."

Naive fools and cynical knaves -- how many times do we see these same actors appear?

6/6/11, 5:11 PM
truf is trounced said...

"Steve, you may be the most beattin'-a-horse-ta-def, Negro I've met in my 45 years of life."

Do you own a house or intend to buy one in the next 5 years or so, Truth? Fact is, it's only just now becoming stark reality as people who own homes, want to sell them or buy them realize a simple correction in the market won't return home values to normal.

And people need to be given the kind of guidance that those who have something to gain by the sale of a home won't give them.

I suspect that as I've read elsewhere some of the homes are of such low quality or in such a bad location that they are mostly worthless. Otherwise, a bit of commonsense, might be enough to steer you clear of a home rebuilt over a 40+ yo foundation or one built so far from a center of jobs it's laughable.

Intuition isn't enough when relatively large amounts of money are at stake, however. I say more power to anyone who helps us make good decisions about one of the most important durable goods we will ever buy.

6/6/11, 5:11 PM
Svigor said...

Everything is a proxy to bash minorities for you isn't it?

Everything in the universe has to sing in the chorus for you people to be happy.

99.99% just ain't enough.

6/6/11, 5:16 PM
Anonymous said...

Truth, shouldn't you be out enjoying the Black Spring?
Gilbert Pinfold.

6/6/11, 5:24 PM
Svigor said...

Steve, you may be the most beattin'-a-horse-ta-def, Negro I've met in my 45 years of life.

Next time you brush your teeth, look dead ahead to find the even-newer record-holder.

6/6/11, 5:47 PM
Anonymous said...

Ultimately, this will lead to bankruptcy for the bank.

No, the banks will get bailed out, with your pension.

6/6/11, 5:57 PM
AmericanGoy said...

"How can anyone even consider honest, effective regulation possible?"

Me.

Regulation can work, as that is the only option available.

The trouble is pinpointing how much government oversight is necessary and not go beyond that point.

In America, of course, we are in corporatism, as our politicians are bought by lobbies. representing mega corporations and foreign governments.

So what we have are people who are supposed to be regulated outright buying people who regulate them.

Under these circumstances, I can understand (well, not really) the Libertarians call for limiting government's role.

It is a misguided call, as it will lead us to the wonderful life as Chinese serfs or Mexican mequilladora workers (or worse - there is a quote by an American politician: "We are very competitive here, we've got prison labor!").

What I am getting at in my usual convoluted way is this - there is one thing that socialists, liberals, communists, republicans, social conservatives and libertarians all agree on - and that is getting rid of the lobby system in this country.

Everything else - lack of regulation resulting in the current global financial crisis while the people who caused it get record bonuses, Israel's AIPAC steering our foreign policy, etc. etc. etc. (pick your cause) - is but a symptom.

Getting rid of the lobby system is the only way to get us onto the process of saving this country.

If it's not too late already.

6/6/11, 6:06 PM
AmericanGoy said...

"Stuff Black People Don't Like said...

"So we’re still waiting for the book that will give us the inside story on the Bush Bust—the Republicans’ catastrophic 2000s—and its contribution to the Crash of 2008."

Why don't you write it Steve? You've produced ample material at Takimag, Alternative Right, Vdare, and your blog. "

I DID.

http://americangoy.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-financial-crisis-came-about.html

6/6/11, 6:07 PM
Anonymous said...

Beating a dead horse? No. Clearly the horse is still alive, and is getting ready for another crazy run.

Keep beating it, I say.

6/6/11, 6:14 PM
Anonymous said...

Did you see the flag they're flying outside the Fed building? With such goings on, maybe Fannie Mae too should be called Fannie Gae.

6/6/11, 7:09 PM
Anonymous said...

msnbc’s new LEAN FORWARD magazine ad campaign, featuring msnbc host Lawrence O’Donnell, includes a handwritten note from Larry. “This country was built on a very simple idea: We all aren’t here yet. With more people and more ways of looking at the world, we will have better ideas. IMMIGRATION IS AN ADED VALUE TO THIS COUNTRY. It always has been.” - Lawrence O'Donnnell

WTF?

6/6/11, 7:45 PM
Anonymous said...

Steve - O/T but tonight Jerome Corsi is out with all sorts of new documents about Barack Sr.

Senior was a real scumbag, and I think it's fair to say that it's no longer clear whether he should even be considered the leading candidate for biological father anymore.

6/6/11, 8:11 PM
Wandrin said...

"Steve, you may be the most beattin'-a-horse-ta-def, Negro I've met in my 45 years of life."

No ones in jail for it. That means the first steps of doing it again are already being taken.

6/6/11, 8:56 PM
TGGP said...

Economics of Contempt fairly reliably savages Gretchen Morgenson's work in the NYT. Looking forward to his review.

6/6/11, 9:15 PM
Truth said...

BLACK SPRING, GILBERT!

6/6/11, 9:32 PM
beowulf said...

Social Security expenditures exceeded the program’s non-interest income in 2010 for the first
time since 1983. This deficit stood at $49 billion last year... This deficit is expected to shrink to about $20 billion for years 2012-2014 as the economy strengthens.

OT is fine, but OT and misleading is annoying. The the old age, survivors, and disability insurance (OASDI) trust fund actually ran a healthy surplus in 2010 if you include the interest income.
Interest earnings 108.2 [bill.]
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/index.html

We don't have a Social Security problem, we have an unemployment problem (if you're not working, you're not paying FICA taxes).

6/6/11, 9:34 PM
Truth said...

What should someone be in jail for, Wandrin?

6/6/11, 10:31 PM
Kylie said...

"Senior was a real scumbag,"

About what Stanley Ann deserved.

"...and I think it's fair to say that it's no longer clear whether he should even be considered the leading candidate for biological father anymore."

Can't agree. If Stanley Ann wanted to thumb her nose at white America, as I suspect she did, she couldn't have found a better candidate in that time and place than a womanizing, married, shifty and shiftless black Kenyan. For her, the personal really was political.

6/6/11, 10:46 PM
Anonymous said...

How knew is this fusion of ideology and corruption that justifies personal avarice on the scale of Crassus and social destruction on the scale of the Goths?

6/7/11, 2:59 AM
Henry Canaday said...

The 0.3% is a short-term rate, the 3% is a long-term rate. Not comparable.

6/7/11, 3:49 AM
jack strocchi said...

The biggest problem in political economy seems to be the conjugation of capitalist church and socialist state.

Thus we have the example of Fannie Mae (quasi-socialist agency) and Goldman Sachs (quasi-capitalist firm) going hand in hand to milk the public, grabbing rewards for stake-holders and lumping risk onto the tax-payers. Heads they win, tails we lose.

Add to that the linking of New Right debtquity with New Left diversity and we have a recipe for financial mayhem.

Thats post-modern liberalism in a nuts-hell.

6/7/11, 4:21 AM
Yolanda H said...

Morgenson's book is good for spelling out how it happened and whodunnit for public scorn, but judging by history, most people will be too stupid to learn anything from it, and it will all happen again, perhaps in a slightly different but all-too-familiar way.

6/7/11, 4:24 AM
Gordon Walker said...

Anonymous
"Everything is a proxy to bash minorities for you isn't it?"
A fair point and even more so the poisonous swell of anti-semitism that is smetimes detectable here.
However, Sailer's judgement on this issue and many others is assentially correct, which is why I continue to read his blog.
I might add thet my girl friend here in France was borne in Haiti and has the typical skin colour of the folks of that country.
Fortunately she does not understand written English, athough she is fluent in French, Dutch, Spanish and Creole. Otherwise an elderly mayoritarian WASP would risk a good bashing!

6/7/11, 4:47 AM
The Anti-Gnostic said...

What should someone be in jail for, Wandrin?

Fraud. Fiduciaries sold clients on positions and then bet against them. They published rigged models to get favorable ratings.

The credit default contracts which were purchased without insurable interest should have been entirely revocable.

If not jail, most of Wall Street should be in bankruptcy court right now. If you're an officer of some sleazy little state bank and pull this shit, bankruptcy is the least that will happen to you.

6/7/11, 6:31 AM
Anonymous said...

Can't agree.

Read the Corsi piece - there are a number of official documents that Senior filled out, in the immediate aftermath of little Barry's birth, in which he didn't even list any wives or any children.

It was as if he didn't consider little Barry to be his own son - which would be in line with Jack Cashill's suspicion - that Senior may have been recruited to pretend to be the father, so as to help cover up some other [even more embarrassing] shenanigans.

6/7/11, 6:36 AM
Anonymous said...

For her, the personal really was political.

As Steve has pointed out [and I believe was the first to point out], Stanley Ann was only 17 when Senior [or whomever] knocked her up.

That would be one terribly malformed 17-year-old mind to be thinking be big geopolitical marxist-leninist thoughts with her womb.

[Which is not to say that it didn't happen as you have speculated, just that, if it did, then we are dealing with some pretty serious social pathologies.]

6/7/11, 6:48 AM
Kylie said...

"That would be one terribly malformed 17-year-old mind to be thinking be big geopolitical marxist-leninist thoughts with her womb.

[Which is not to say that it didn't happen as you have speculated, just that, if it did, then we are dealing with some pretty serious social pathologies.]"

You're forgetting she was apparently indoctrinated by her dominating, left-wing father. Admittedly, I conclude this based on what's been reported about him dominating (e.g., his insistence of giving his daughter his name because he wanted a son) and left-wing (can't remember where I read that and in a hurry to catch a plane so won't go looking for links).

Besides, a teenager doesn't have to traffic in "big, political Marxist-Leninist thought" to want to stick her thumb in the eye of the powers-that-be. Nothing is more natural than for a teenaged girl deliberately to select an unsuitable mate in an act of defiance or rebellion.

6/7/11, 9:10 AM
Anonymous said...

"poisonous swell of anti-semitism"

No, healthy dose of counter-semitism or criti-semitism. Those with power need to be critiqued and countered.

6/7/11, 11:12 AM
Anonymous said...

“This country was built on a very simple idea: We all aren’t here yet."

His mind certainly isn't all there yet and I doubt if it ever will be.

6/7/11, 11:14 AM
Anonymous said...

>pretty serious social pathologies<

The whole religious/idealist/glassy-eyed/kumbaya/John Brown phenomenon (the roots of modern American leftism). We have not emerged from the Dark Ages. Its zealots still march.

6/7/11, 12:23 PM
dcite said...

"If Stanley Ann wanted to thumb her nose at white America, as I suspect she did, she couldn't have found a better candidate in that time and place than a womanizing, married, shifty and shiftless black Kenyan. For her, the personal really was political."

An even better one would be Frank Marshall Davis.
Obama the Kenyan (the senior one) had no historical beef with the United States. Probably neutral as long as he got what he wanted.

6/7/11, 12:32 PM
Truth said...

"Fraud. Fiduciaries sold clients on positions and then bet against them. They published rigged models to get favorable ratings."

These are banking offenses, not "minority" offenses. If Sailer was interestedin persecuting Banking offenses, he could have been writing columns on his IBM Selectric at Rice. Sailer does not care about helping to persecute greedy, criminal bankers, he cares about helping to persecute NAMs, and when all you have is a hammer....

6/7/11, 12:55 PM
Wandrin said...

Truth,

Fraud.

6/7/11, 2:56 PM
Wandrin said...

"These are banking offenses, not "minority" offenses."

Minority organisations like ACORN were intimately involved in creating the sub-prime mortgage market.

Wall Street and Washington took advantage of what you could call the culture of affirmative action to build a fraud out of it.

The AA shake-down artists and the Wall Street and washington crooks are completely entwined.

.
"A fair point and even more so the poisonous swell of anti-semitism that is smetimes detectable here."

Take the last 100 Hollywood films and while keeping everything else the same
- take every stupid and/or villanous white southern character and replace them with a black actor
- take every stupid and/or villainous blond haired character and replace them with a mexican
- take every stupid and/or villainous preppy white character with a very obvious wasp name like "Gordon Walker" and replace them with a Jewish character called Levy or Cohen

Do that and it becomes obvious how Hollywood is blatantly and relentlessly anti-white.

.

6/7/11, 3:23 PM
Anonymous said...

Minority organisations like ACORN were intimately involved in creating the sub-prime mortgage market.

And organizations like Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, which employed a certain young Harvard Law School graduate to perform lead work for them, on a case called Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, all the way back in 1995.

6/7/11, 3:57 PM
Truth said...

The real estate market crashed all over Europe, as well as Asia; even as far as in Iceland. Was that a coincidence, or was it the "A.A. shakedown artists" there also?

6/7/11, 5:26 PM
Truth said...

"Do that and it becomes obvious how Hollywood is blatantly and relentlessly anti-white."

No, it becomes obvious how anti-everyone else Hollywood was, until about 1998.

6/7/11, 5:28 PM
none of the above said...

This Rolling Stone article describes some potential criminal charges in the financial meltdown. Though I'll admit I don't really expect to see Goldman face serious Justice Dept actions. My guess is they'll decide to "look forward, not back" here, since the criminals are extremely powerful.

6/7/11, 6:52 PM
none of the above said...

Truth:

As best I can understand it, the housing bubble was driven by cheap money, poorly understood risk models, and human psychology. The rhetoric of helping NAMs afford a house and the ownership society were used by Famnie and Freddie to justify doing stuff that took on much more risk (in institutions with a de facto government guarantee on their debts) in order to make more profits as the bubble inflated. I think the same justification was used by Countrywide and other banks, again, as cover for something imprudent but profitable.

As far as I can tell, Steve's calling this the diversity recession is massive hyperbole. Every bubble inflates partly by people silencing their doubts (or the doubts of the marks!) with some kind of happy or virtuous story. In this recession, one of those stories involved helping poor people, especially minorities, get their first home. Another, related story was the virtues of the ownership society.

The place where steve's term makes some sense is that PC makes people stupid. Lots and lots of people found that the combination of PC justification and powerful interests pushing to keep the bubble inflating allowed them to swallow their doubts and questions. But it sure seems like this was a matter of con men understanding their marks, rather than ideology blinding everyone to reality. (That would be the Iraq war.)

6/7/11, 7:19 PM
none of the above said...

Wandering:

I think that turns things on their head. Activists and diversity shakedown artists were small-time parasites, with very little ability to make anyone do anything. They were entwined with the likes of Countrywide and Goldman the same way a dog is entwined with its fleas. ACORN and similar groups could have protested till doomsday without inflating a disastrous housing bubble.

6/7/11, 7:26 PM
Wandrin said...

Truth,

"The real estate market crashed all over Europe, as well as Asia; even as far as in Iceland. Was that a coincidence, or was it the "A.A. shakedown artists" there also?"

The fully grown-up answer is the credit bubble ultimately derived from the federal reserve keeping interest rates too low. This was made worse in some other western countries through the actions of their own central banks creating local bubbles on top of the fed's global bubble e.g. Iceland.

(Personally i see it as the fed trying to disguise the economic damage being caused by off-shoring through creating cheap money but that part is debateable.)

This bubble would have burst sooner or later for some reason or other and ultimately the blame lies with the central banking system, Wall St and their rentboys in government.

However it just happens that the catalyst for the bubble to burst in this case was the sub-prime mortgages that banks were forced to provide through the actions of AA shake-down artists and that is important for other reasons.


.
"No, it becomes obvious how anti-everyone else Hollywood was, until about 1998."

As you accept it's blatantly anti-white now i won't quibble over the date.

.
None of the Above
"I think that turns things on their head. Activists and diversity shakedown artists were small-time parasites"

As mentioned above i think they were the catalyst for the bubble bursting rather than the cause of the bubble but it's worth stressing their role because the reason sub-prime mortgages were the catalyst - banks being forced to make irrational loans because of AA shake-down artists - is such a good example of the damage caused by one of the dishonest tactics of AA.

If you have two populations, one is 50% blue collar and 50% white collar, and the other is 80% blue collar and 20% white collar then those two groups will have different average outcomes. What the AA shake-down artists do is rig the averages by not comparing like with like i.e. not comparing across the same socio-economic bands.

In the above example it might be that 30% of blue collar and 70% of white collar had mortgages across both populations but when averaged together it comes out as 50% of the first population and 38% of the second population.

If they'd compared minority vs white mortgage take-up across the same socio-economic bands sub-prime mortgages wouldn't have happened.

6/7/11, 8:25 PM
Anonymous said...

This Rolling Stone article describes...

I used to be a pretty happy-go-lucky, good-natured kinduva guy, and, all in all, I'm still fairly optimistic about many things, but when I saw that the figurehead chosen to lead the campaign to destroy Matt Taibbi was none other than Nell Minow, I suddenly knew that Kevin MacDonald was right.

About everything.

6/7/11, 8:46 PM
Truth said...

You're right about the "grown up answer" my friend, (on some level, but we'll get back to that) but the major supplemental cause of the bubble was the rapid escalation in prices, which caused homeowners to see their homes as bank accounts, taking out seconds, interest only loans, rampant flipping by amateurs, etc.

This includes the good ole' white people who had lived in their homes for years before the bubble.

Housing being exempted from capital gains was probably a much larger factor than any minority program (which more whites than blacks took advantage of anyway.) Plain speculative fever, greed and "monkey-see, monkey-do" were much larger factors as well. Now for the REAL grown up answer:

The housing bubble occurred for the same reason every other financial disaster does; rich, white oligarchs run roughshod over a system that they basically own, and will soon totally own and people like yourselves make excuses for them.

They could execute the bubble because they operate on a system of capitalism when things go well, and socialism when the go poorly, look at the bailouts.

They like when you come up with this silly, insignificant deflections of responsibility, when, as I pointed out earlier with the bubble being a worldwide event, they are completely senseless.

The military, mercantile, media, and all three government branches are all tentacles of the same octopus. If you cannot see this, you are the fool, and the tool, not Jamal or Jose.

What it all comes down to is that you will either be part of the cure, or part of the problem...you cannot be both.

And concerning the Hollywood thing, congratulations on seeing .05% of the the conspiracy, you should be proud.

6/7/11, 9:11 PM
Svigor said...

No, healthy dose of counter-semitism or criti-semitism. Those with power need to be critiqued and countered.

No, no, no. Having 99.999% of everything your way, but still obsessing over the remaining .001%, is healthy, moral, and sane.

6/8/11, 7:26 AM
Svigor said...

Haha, good one, False. But if that's the case, then where's the white Machete or Inglorious Basterds? The black Deliverance?

It simply cannot be argued that Hollywood was ever as pro-white as it is now anti-white. A few "mammy" blacks do not a Machete make. And even back in the "pro-white" days it was just a matter of knowing their audience, and taking baby-steps. Hence the slow progression from there to here (which makes Whiskey's theory of white women in the audience as shot-callers look as silly as it is).

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that entertainment is largely consumed by white folks, which really drives home for me how hostile its producers are. The default position for Hollywood should be "pro-white," the same way the default position for Japanese cinema is pro-Japanese.

6/8/11, 7:40 AM
Luke Lea said...

Remember this Monty Python take on the crisis back at the beginning? Very funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFmYIFk5i1Q

6/8/11, 8:21 AM
Svigor said...

The housing bubble occurred for the same reason every other financial disaster does; rich, white oligarchs run roughshod over a system that they basically own, and will soon totally own and people like yourselves make excuses for them.

These "rich, white oligarchs" all had "diversity" and "equality" on their lips all the while. Pointing that out is not excuse-making.

6/8/11, 10:53 AM
Truth said...

" Pointing that out is not excuse-making."

You're right, it's being complicitous in a fraud, from which you didn't profit.

6/8/11, 1:58 PM
Truth said...

"Haha, good one, False. But if that's the case, then where's the white Machete or Inglorious Basterds? The black Deliverance?"

Every ghetto, "hood-crime" movie is the black deliverance, and it would be a little silly to do a white machete because white people have nothing to overcome, they own everything. I would be like doing an "overcoming tremendous odds" picture about a Jamaican guy winning a 100m dash, or a Korean guy opening a store.

6/9/11, 9:51 AM
Anonymous said...

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/06/07/fanniegate-gamechanger-for-the-gop/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/06/10/when-government-jumps-the-shark/

6/11/11, 9:17 PM
Anonymous said...

Fannie Mae was like a crooked deli. It used to buy reasonably fresh meat and sell it to Wall Street. But it began to buy a lot of bad meat(from minority suppliers). What to do with all this bad rotting meat? Wall Street comes up with new processing system whereby the bad meat is ground up and mixed with the good meat and a lot of salt, turned into $alami, and then sliced and sold as grade AAA meat to all the customers around the world.

But there's just too much bad meat and even the salt and spices cannot hide the taste or stop the infection. So, the rot begins to spread and those who took a big bite out of it began to have massive diarrhea. So, government hands out 'free' pepto bismol to a lot of people.
Anyway, the $salami turned out to be baloney, and there's no such thing as free lunch.

Michelle says kids should eat better food, but Wall Street and government really need to run a better deli.

6/11/11, 9:54 PM
Anonymous said...

Btw, GOP cannot use the Reckless Endangerment narrative as Mead recommends because the party is too beholden to Wall Street. Fannie Mae may be the arch villain, but it had a lot of accomplices on Wall Street. GOP take on that cashcow? When donkeys fly.

6/11/11, 10:00 PM
NOTA said...

Anon:

This is very much like the S&L scandal a few years back. Both parties were complicit, so it's not in the interests of either party to see political coverage in the MSM digging too deeply into the details of the meltdown. Fortunately for them, most political reporting works in such a way that if the Dems and Repubs agree that X isn't an issue worth talking about, X never comes up. Unfortunately for them, financial reporters aren't political reporters.

6/12/11, 8:11 PM

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