How do we know there are not, as yet uncovered, other ‘bubbles’ lurking out there?

Question by mike_876875: How do we know there are not, as yet uncovered, other ‘bubbles’ lurking out there?
My question might be naive so please respond with that in mind that I know it might be. And meaningful answers, please, no one liners.
I remember in 2004 graduating students at my university were having a hard time finding jobs because the internet bubble had just burst and the economy was in a downturn. By the time I graduated things improved somewhat and I found something. Now again 5 years later things are down after the burst of the ‘mortgage’ bubble (securitization of mortgages, lenient housing loan legislation) and people are again jobless.

-How do we know there are not other bubbles lurking out there or yet to form, that will surface at some point, masked by the illusion of economic growth.

-Is this the normal cyclical progression of a capitalistic economy, that is it reaches a bubble, bursts, then hits a bottom every 5 years and people lose jobs? That is lousy, if that’s how it is supposed to work.

-In other words, is there a bubble at the end of every growth cycle? I mean it is almost like it is one thing or another – first an internet bubble, then a mortgage bubble.

Thanks.
How can one be knowledgeable enough (books I can read?) so as not to be effected as much (worst, be buffeted around) by these forces, with or without their knowledge? (e.g. be a business owner versus a corporate employee, sign up for recession insurance 🙂 ).

Best answer:

Answer by willwork4food89
There are certainly bubbles left to come, but you raise a fine issue with the “normal cyclical progression of a capitalistic economy”.

The real answer is that we have no clue what capitalism does. We are writing the book as we go along. Marx believes it’s going to collapse, and socialism will occur. Is that where we are today? Who knows? That’s the more pessimistic view.

Others believe that capitalism is a permanent, 3 steps forward, 1 step back kind of economy. Every once in a while we take a few extra steps back, but in the long run we will prosper. Will that happen indefinitely? Who knows? That’s the more optimistic view.

The real key to understanding our situation is to realize that we have no idea what will happen. It is currently accepted that capitalism “naturally progresses” from a manufacturing economy to a service based economy. Why? Because that’s what happened to the US and Europe. However, our collapses have been in these highly volatile service based industries. Once again, who knows?

The bubbles happen because people get overly excited and there is a lot of activity that cannot be sustained. That happens in free market economics. Will the bubbles be less severe if the government sets out stricter regulations? Maybe. Will the bubbles be worse and worse with the extent of globalization? You can argue that.

I study economics, and I like to sit back and observe things as they come. Like I said, the key to understanding everything is that economists are just as clueless as everyone else. It’s hard to write a theory and implement it when we have little to no background to go on.

To answer your question, if we (the US) continue to go down the path that we’ve been going (NAFTA, free market, etc) we will certainly see more bubbles and recessions and depressions in the future.

Add your own answer in the comments!

Q&A: Who really caused the sub-prime crises Democrats?

Question by america first: Who really caused the sub-prime crises Democrats?
The Subprime Debacle
by Dr. Kuni Michael Beasley
30 Years in Gestation

The Democrats are doing a lot to try to pin the subprime debacle on the Republicans and the Bush administration. However, there is a long tail to this problem that just happened to pop at this time.

Now, for the rest of the story. Definitions first.

Fannie Mae is the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), founded in 1938 as a publically traded government sponsored enterprise (GSE) that is stockholder owned that makes loans and issue loan guarantees.
Its cousin is Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), founded in 1970 as another GSE created to expand the secondary market for mortgages. Freddie Mac buys individual mortgages on the secondary market, pooled them into packages, and sold them to investors on the open market.

The secondary market packaged mortgages as collateral and issues securities called collateralized mortgage obligations (CMO) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO), to reduce the risk of individual loans. CMOs are a separate entity that is the actual legal owner of the mortgages it has in a “pool.” CMOs sell bonds to investors based on the value of the mortgages. Investors receive payments based on the increased value of the loans in the pool. The collateral for the bonds are the actual mortgages.

CDOs are a separate entity like CMOs, but are more focused on fixed income assets such as, but not limited to mortgages (and can include commercial mortgages and corporate loans). The focus is cash flow and slices (tranches) of these cash flows are sold to investors.

The subprime mortgage crisis surfaced first in 2007, but it had been incubating for years, indeed, decades. Though roots can be traced back to the New Deal legislation in the 1930’s, the current crisis actually draws its source from the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) [1977] during the Carter administration that forced banks to lend money to less credit worthy clients. Lending institutions were evaluated to determine if it met the “credit needs of the community” and this was factored into regulatory decisions of the federal government such as applications for facilities, mergers, and acquisitions.

Interest in the CRA resurfaced in the Clinton administration when regulations in the CRA (which could be manipulated without any participation of congress) essentially forced institutions to offer loans to higher risk individuals and businesses. The term “Ninja” loans emerged describing high risk loans made to people with No Income, No Job, and no Assets, but completed a particular bank’s portfolio sufficient to keep federal regulators off their backs.

As access to easy money for high risk borrowers increased, certain institutions began to take advantage of these new opportunities to score fed points and make easy money. Name dropping here: Countrywide began to process, package, and offer investment instruments (CMOs) based on these loans. Revisions to the CRA by the Clinton administration allowed mortgage companies to offer loans without the relative reserve of deposits normally required of banks and other financial institutions.
In addition, this allowed for securitization of sub prime mortgages based on the pooling and packaging of cash-flow producing assets into securities that could be sold to investors – with the asset value not tagged to actual value of the property, but to the value of the cash flow produced by the asset held (sounds weird). The first public securitization of CRA loans was started in 1997 by (familiar name) Bear Stearns!

Now, let’s understand sub-prime loans for a moment. A sub-prime loan is a mortgage offered at a deep discount on interest the first year or two so the borrower could qualify for a larger loan and more expensive house, betting that their economic profile would get better and they could afford large payments later. Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) are a form of this where the entry rate is low and rises based on certain criteria such as the rates for government securities.

Simply put, lenders (not necessarily banks, but more often mortgage
companies) offered low cost, low entry rate mortgages to people who would not normally qualify for that amount of debt.

These loans were “warehoused” by financial institutions, where a financial institution like Merrill Lynch would set up a separate, but wholly owned mortgage company (First Franklin) to attract loans.
Merrill Lynch would retain control of the loans as a “trustee” or “servicer,” and derive benefits from fees for “managing” the loans and increase assets by keeping escrow deposits. In turn, these loans would be sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac (who were assumed to guarantee the loans), who, in turn, repackaged them for the secondary market.

In 2003 the Bush administration tried to head-off what they saw as a potential crisis by moving the supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under a new agency

Best answer:

Answer by Hater Police
Both parties are to blame AND financial companies AND consumers.

Add your own answer in the comments!

Q&A: Private Equity, Assest Management and Investment Banking?

Question by Confused: Private Equity, Assest Management and Investment Banking?
I feel i get the gist of how these three differ. But I’m not entirely sure. Could someone define and describe these please?

Best answer:

Answer by FatHalo
PE’s are private companies (not listed on exchanges) who usually take over all or part of other businesses equity (and voting voices) in order to take control the management using different types of strategies (LBO’s, Venture Capital, Growth capital, Distressed, Mezzanine …) PE’s invest their money into companies in order to take them over, influence their management and/or finance a capital-strapped company on advantageous terms all in the objective of benefiting from long term return on equity.

Asset management firms are rather intermediaries who advise and invest in and manage funds on behalf of their clients. These firms apply ” financial analysis, asset selection, stock selection, plan implementation and ongoing monitoring” in order to provide portfolios that fits the needs, objectives and risk tolerance of their clients and reach the optimal return for the given risk. They are not behind a specific stock, company, bond or any other asset class (that might include PE), they just manage the allocation of funds among these.

Investment banking is a little bit fuzzy word, but in its strict meaning, it refers to firms that help in the securitization, security issuance (equity or bonds), IPO’s, mergers and acquisitions, underwriting, … So, investment banks do not actually own the shares they help issue in case of an IPO (well sometimes they do) but it is only with the intention of selling them on the secondary market, with hopefully high enough spreads.

So few criteria to distinguish between the 3 if you will is the level of ownership of assets, degree of involvement and holding horizon. I would rank the 3 companies from ‘high’ on all these 3 criteria (PE) to ‘low’ (IB). PE’s make big and long term commitments by taking over a majority or minority parts of a company (think about Cerberus in GMAC) in order to either influence its management or take advantage of a long-term capital need. Asset managements only construct portfolios of different assets on behalf of their clients and do not own these assets themselves (If one asset loses value, only investors holding that specific asset lose money, the AM company itself do not incure any loss, whereas for an PE, if a company make a loss, the loss is reflected in the value of PE and all investors in PE take that loss). IBs theoretically do not get involved in the asset price or value beyond their function as advisors and underwritters (well they could lose money in some cases)

Add your own answer in the comments!

Did the GrammLeache bill in 1999 really ‘deregulate’ banks? Is that why Ron Paul voted against it? Loves regs?

Question by DAR: Did the GrammLeache bill in 1999 really ‘deregulate’ banks? Is that why Ron Paul voted against it? Loves regs?
http://reason.com/blog/show/129593.html\

That followed bailing out hedge funds, if you recall. Ron Paul, rather than seeing it as deregulating saw it as a set up for further bailouts and taxpayer liability for failing entities. He thought the deregulation parts could be written in a one page bill and the rest was new REGULATION which would end up creating bubbles and shifting liability for business ventures to taxpayers.

Sound familiar?

And if he was so prescient then, why is the government now only turning for solutions to those who drove us off a cliff, to begin with?

From 1999:

“today we are considering a bill aimed at modernizing the financial services industry through deregulation. It is a worthy goal which I support. However, this bill falls short of that goal. The negative aspects of this bill outweigh the benefits….

The growth in money and credit has outpaced both savings and economic growth. These inflationary pressures have been concentrated in asset prices, not consumer price inflation–keeping monetary policy too easy. This increase in asset prices has fueled domestic borrowing and spending.
Government policy and the increase in securitization are largely responsible for this bubble. In addition to loose monetary policies by the Federal Reserve, government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have contributed to the problem. The fourfold increases in their balance sheets from 1997 to 1998 boosted new home borrowings to more than $ 1.5 trillion in 1998, two-thirds of which were refinances which put an extra $ 15,000 in the pockets of consumers on average–and reduce risk for individual institutions while increasing risk for the system as a whole.
The rapidity and severity of changes in economic conditions can affect prospects for individual institutions more greatly than that of the overall economy. The Long Term Capital Management hedge fund is a prime example. New companies start and others fail every day. What is troubling with the hedge fund bailout was the governmental response and the increase in moral hazard.
This increased indication of the government’s eagerness to bail out highly-leveraged, risky and largely unregulated financial institutions bodes ill for the post S. 900 future as far as limiting taxpayer liability is concerned. LTCM isn’t even registered in the United States but the Cayman Islands!
…My main reasons for voting against this bill are the expansion of the taxpayer liability and the introduction of even more regulations. The entire multi-hundred page S. 900 that reregulates rather than deregulates the financial sector could be replaced with a simple one-page bill.
Should they be listening to Ron Paul – who is telling them to let the market handle this mess rather than extending the pain with bailouts?

Best answer:

Answer by Greg
It merely dissolved the “firewall” between investment banks and consumer banks. After the Great Depression, the FDR Administration in effect said to the investment banks, “If you want to gamble, fine, but you aren’t going to do it with peoples’ life savings”, so they prohibited consumer banks from investing in stocks and other such instruments.

What it did not do is deregulate OTC commodities (default swaps are a huge problem right now). That was done in the 1999 Commodities Modernization Act (again introduced by Phil Gramm), and what it did not do is place capital reserve requirements on investment banks (and the root of the problem was just how highly leveraged these firms were).

As for the setup for future bailouts, that’s baked in to the mergers that are underway. We saw from the Lehman bankruptcy (Lehman was leveraged at about 50-1) that the fallout was severe, so the Fed and the Treasury were forced to act to keep the investment banks from folding, but amid all of this there is further consolidation through mergers and acquisitions of both consumer and investment banks, so if they were too big to fail before, well the ones that are left are bigger.

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Q&A: the subprime meltdown econ test?

Question by taylah.: the subprime meltdown econ test?
i have a test on the subprime meltdown need to know these key words just basically their defiinition and the role they play in a meltdown….
the fed
the prime rate
alan greenspan
NASDAQ bubble
ben bernanke
subprime loan
FICO
liquidity
equity
types of subprime loans
adjustable rate (ARM – balloon)
securities
SEC-securities exchange commission
dervatives
securitization
diversifying risk
off balance sheet entities
TARP
troubled assets
taxpayer protection
making homes affordable plan
office of financial stability
ARRA (the stimulus) – discription
keynesian economics
supply side economics – reaganomics – milton friedman)

Best answer:

Answer by Bored Goblin
“the fed” are the upper-class people, who benefitted by ripping off the “the hungry” during the crisis.

you can look up other terms here: http://wikipedia.org

What do you think? Answer below!

How was the United Kingdom affected by the Credit Crisis in 2008?

Question by Jay: How was the United Kingdom affected by the Credit Crisis in 2008?
I am currently working on a term paper regarding the credit crisis impact on the UK. I understand prior to the credit crisis, the UK banking system derived there cash flows from securtization and the financial markets. Most of there operations were not derived from deposits. I am trying to find out if this market securitization that the UK was involved in came from the US sub-primed mortgages or other debt’s. If any one can explain this and how the ties between the UK and US were related. Also, I relized that the UK, besides the US, had a smaller decrease in there Stock Market when compared to other countries like China, India, Canada and others for the year ending of 2008. The UK and the US fell around the same amount which was approximatly 31%. Any help on this is greatly appreciated!!

Best answer:

Answer by Dating-Expert
UK was seriously affected by Credit Crisis
Many financial institutions collapsed, many retailers closed their businesses such as woolworth etc
Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs
employees in public sector got their salary increment frozen
in short it affected almost every single person in one way or another

Give your answer to this question below!

Why are people still hoodwinked into believing the Community Reinvestment Act is major reason why we’re here?

Question by Change Now: Why are people still hoodwinked into believing the Community Reinvestment Act is major reason why we’re here?
What a load of propaganda crap that the right has plopped on the American psyche.

There are people out there who actually think that the CRA brought down our economy. What fools,

The CRA was created at a time when subprimes could be easily absorbed into the market. They would make up less than 5% of all mortgages.

The current catastrophe was caused by SECURITIZATION of mortgages. Harvard MBA’s used derivatives and came up with a mathematical model for rich people to get richer because they weren’t making enough money thru other fixed returns like T-Bills.

The banks made tons and tons of money by packaging this load of crap and selling them onto pension funds, etc. all around the world.

When people couldn’t pay the monthly minimums and the underlying asset prices stopped rising and began to fall, the whole house of cards came crashing down. The CRA loans to poor folks with small loan balances played a small role. Most of the bad loans were on speculators or on big mortgages

Best answer:

Answer by M Taylor
The root of the problem is that the average American is a moron. Its not PC to say this and plenty of people who profit from those morons will be quick to feign indignation if anyone says it, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

There is a reason that you have more votes for American Idol then the next President of the United States.

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Can our economic trouble we are facing today be traced back to ?

Question by TicToc….: Can our economic trouble we are facing today be traced back to ?
the Carter days when he and the democrats passed the Community Reinvestment Act back in 1977 ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act

It has a chain of events that point to former democrat presidents as well. Clinton in 1995 strengthen the bill by introducing subprime authorization. Future revisions allowed the securitization of the CRA loans containing mortgages forced banks to issue 1 Trillion Dollars in Subprime Loans.

1992 : Required Fanny Mae and Freddie mac to purchase and securitize mortgages. Which lead to lending support for affordable housing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Housing_Enterprises_Financial_Safety_and_Soundness_Act_of_1992

It only get worse from this point on!

My point is that this problem is caused by the government legislation, and shell companies that lend bad credit to unqualified borrowers, who don’t have the means to pay it back. They did everything in their power to cause this. Call it an ace in the hole or up your sleeve if you will. This came up in October before an election, which I think was purposefully intended by the democrats as an insurance policy to get Obama elected.

Best answer:

Answer by curious21
True but not accurate enough; rather than 1977, it can be traced back to the implementation of a privatized banking system that is under no regulations but what it sets; Woodrow Wilson, 1913. Worst president ever, yea even more than Bush

What do you think? Answer below!

Do we need another FDR to save the Banks?Its official the worst banking crisis since the great depression?

Question by james T: Do we need another FDR to save the Banks?Its official the worst banking crisis since the great depression?
A fews month before FDR was president, every bank in the nation failed.Its unanimous he Reversed the 1933 Banking Crisis.Hes the reason we have the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. He openeded Federal reserve banks in 12 cities, created the security exchange commision. The reason we are having problems today is because of Securitization in structured finance he actually created reforms in this but Truman deleted this component of reform.I like Truman, but he wasn’t as savvy about Banks as FDR was.FDR is the greatest president ever not because of war because he saved our banking system with reforms…..

Do we need a new FDR?

Best answer:

Answer by labowu
Are you’re asking do we need a President with intergrity, courage, foresight, and wisdom? Of course we do. They’re just hard to come by.

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What are your thoughts on this?

Question by DONALD T: What are your thoughts on this?
Many Americans today are unhappy with the Democratic Party.

Yet according to a Gallup poll conducted in July 2010, Democrats were still ahead of Republicans, 49% to 43%, in voters’ generic ballot preferences for the 2010 congressional elections.

Why? A big part of the reason is voter dissatisfaction with the Republican Party. And a major reason for that dissatisfaction is that over the years voters have been fed numerous lies by Democrats and the mainstream media to discredit the GOP.

Here are five of those lies:

1. The Bush administration lied about the intelligence leading up to the Iraq War.
Two bipartisan investigations demanded by Democrats refute this myth. In 2004, the Robb-Silberman Report, along with a separate Senate Intelligence Committee report, both concluded that there was no evidence that administration officials manipulated intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq.

2. Republicans caused the mortgage crisis.

In reality it was the Democrats who caused the mortgage crisis and stifled Republican efforts to prevent it.
First, Bill Clinton broadened the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), bypassing the Republican-led Congress and ordering the Treasury Department to rewrite the CRA rules to force banks to fulfill loan “quotas” in low income neighborhoods.
Eventually, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were required by HUD to show that 55% of their mortgage purchases were to low and moderate income borrowers, and lending standards were lowered to meet those goals.
Intense competition caused by Fannie and Freddie’s increasing appetite for loans caused investment and commercial banks to compete for borrowers, and the looser lending standards eventually spread to higher-income and prime borrowers as well.
Then came Clinton’s most disastrous decision: he legalized the securitization of subprime mortgages that allowed the market to soar from $ 35 billion in risky loans in 1994 to $ 1 trillion by 2008, thus poisoning the entire mortgage industry.
Republicans tried to rein in Fannie and Freddie’s purchases of subprime mortgages. In both 2003 and 2005, they introduced legislation that would have required Fannie and Freddie to eliminate their investments in them. Both times their attempts were opposed by the Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee, so the bills never made it to Senate floor.

3. Eight years of Republican deregulation caused the financial crisis.

Some myths die harder than others. This is certainly one of them. Financial services were not deregulated during the Bush administration.
The repeal of the Depression-era Glass–Steagall Act in 1999, allowing banks and securities firms to be affiliated under the same roof, was supported by the Clinton administration and signed into law by the president.
Moreover, that was not the cause of the financial crisis. The crisis was caused by banks and investment firms purchasing vast numbers of bad mortgages and mortgage-backed securities.
What contributed to such a high volume of purchases? In 2004, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Democrat Annette Nazareth, who ran the market regulation division at the time, unanimously adopted a rule change known as Basel II.
Adopted by all of the world’s central bankers, Basel II was an attempt to provide greater regulation of investment firms by more accurately evaluating the types of assets they held.
Unfortunately, AAA-rated mortgages were incorrectly considered to be some of the safest assets an institution could own. As a result, Basel II allowed investment banks to leverage their assets of mortgage-backed securities at a ratio as high as 30 to 1. Thus, although Basel II wasn’t the cause of the financial crisis, it certainly contributed to the size of it.

4. Republicans are the “party of Wall Street, big business and special interest groups.”
In the 2008 national election cycle, more campaign donations from the largest banks and Wall Street firms went to Democrats, not Republicans.
Ninety of the top one hundred corporate donors leaned Democratic, and nearly 75 percent of all hedge fund donations in that same period went to presidential candidate Obama.
Furthermore it is the Democratic Party which has deep-rooted unholy alliances with special-interest groups—labor unions, teachers unions, trial lawyers, environmental groups, community organizations such as ACORN and welfare beneficiaries—that often places the interests of those groups ahead of what’s best for the country. Their alliance with trial lawyers, for example, is why tort reform, an effective way to lower health care costs, was not included in the health care bill.

5. Democrats have always stood up for black Americans—and Republicans are either uncaring at best, or overt racists at worst.

Many Americans would be surprised to know that Martin Luther King, Jr. embraced conservative ideals.

Yet King’s choice of political affinity made perfect sense: it was R

Best answer:

Answer by middleclassman
What is going on is that the young world and the fading generations are clashing. The youth is less restrained and has more resources to get information then the fading generations that are mostly Republicans. Also the big wig Republicans don`t want to take the house or senate and share guilt with Obama before the 2012 election.

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Why did the Federal Government sue the Wall Street banks that sold Fannie and Freddie bad mortgages?

Question by ideogenetic: Why did the Federal Government sue the Wall Street banks that sold Fannie and Freddie bad mortgages?
Shouldn’t the “buyer beware”* or is there a role for regulation to prevent criminal economic activity in the debt securitization markets that lead to catastrophic financial collapses?

* Since S&P had ‘AAA’ ratings on the junk paper, how would the buyer know?
For those who missed it:
“Federal Regulators Sue Big Banks Over Mortgages”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/business/bank-suits-over-mortgages-are-filed.html

Best answer:

Answer by TheOnlyBeldin
Because Barney won’t let them go after the true culprit: Fannie and Freddie themselves.

Add your own answer in the comments!

“PAY FOR PERFORMANCE ACT OF 2009″…is this the beginning of a nationalized economy?

Question by The Federalist: “PAY FOR PERFORMANCE ACT OF 2009″…is this the beginning of a nationalized economy?
Barney Frank has introduced a bill in congress that would give the Government authority to set the salary of EVERY SINGLE employee of companies who have utilized government capital aka bail out funds…

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Beyond-AIG-A-Bill-to-let-Big-Government-Set-Your-Salary-42158597.html

Since Frank’s policies are a large part of why we are in this mess doesn’t seem like this was all planned? Force low standards on lending….greenlight the securitization and selling off of government chartered debt….watch it infect the banking system….give hand outs to sick banks….impose complete control over those banks now that they owe billions of dollars.

Barney Frank is as much to blame for this economic mess as anyone on Wall Street or in Washington DC and he wants to use the crisis that he helped create to take total control of the companies that his policies put at risk…It’s like a sick little toad who wants to show all the giants of industry at the private organizations that keep this country moving in a positive direction that the dimwits in Washington are going to take over their jobs by force.

Barney Frank should be tarred and feathered on the steps of Capital Hill and sent to jail for crimes against society and abuse of power. He is the most detestable type of politician I can imagine exists…the type who causes problems with his ignorance and then uses the damage to his own benefit…all while blaming others.
The idea that the failing of these companies will set off a massive depression is a falacy….they told us the exact same thing when GM and Dodge came hat in hand two months ago…they gave them 30 billion because they couldn’t afford to fail….now GM is talking about going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy….so the 30 Billion dollars was wasted and the end result is still the same…And you who said people don’t get to demand better pay….your right…no one will be paid better for better work…so no one will work hard…and the country will slowly diminish under th guise of “fairness”…”THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS” this policy of taxing the producers to provide to the challenged will not stop until the last bone of the last taxpayer is picked clean and their is nothing left to take…the envious ones who have not suceeded will continue to elect those who will take from the producers in this country until their is nothing left…socialism is a failed principle.

Best answer:

Answer by demonhunter5110
i agree. that goes for all of Obamas cabinet. whats he thinking electing the former federal reserve. what a joke. thats how our government or better yet a combination of the bankers and government always work. they did a similar thing to create the first depression and they are doing it again. heres what ya do. April 15 come join American on the new tea day protest. ill give you a link all you do is pick your state and find one in your area. we need protesters from evry state. lets start the revolution!!

http://www.officialtaxdayteaparty.com/index.html

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is anyone good with international relations?

Question by Amanda: is anyone good with international relations?
15. How are international organizations changing the practice of international politics? Do they represent a fundamental force, or simply a minor detail?
16. How are transnational advocacy networks changing the practice of international politics? Do they represent a fundamental force, or simply a minor detail?
17. What are the major approaches to international ethics? [What are the main problems with applying each approach in practice?]
18. Will environmental problems lead to greater cooperation or increased conflict in the international system; or will they have little effect? [why?]
19. What are the links between international environmental problems and economic development?
20. How is “security” being redefined in the contemporary world?
21. How does globalization facilitate transnational crime?
22. What is a “collective action” problem, and how does that concept help us understand international
politics? [Discuss an important collective action problem in international politics as well as the possible solutions.]

Best answer:

Answer by George D
This test is gonna suck tmrw, but 17 is impossible im pretty sure, if u figured it out or 22 post it as a comment on here if you could

15. How are international organizations changing the practice of international politics? Do they represent a fundamental force, or simply a minor detail?

•IO’s Changing
oStarted Effects of a Cause (need ppl to contain problems)
oMoving toward a Cause → Effect (acting, making agendas)
oThousands of IO’s
•Link governmental decisions
•Norms being established
•Affairs are being regulated without an “all-powerful” international government
•Fundamental Force
oTruly Effective when states work together
oUN
•Can apply military force
•Can make agendas on what to try and fix
•Decides members of the int’l community
oEU
•Democratization of Europe
•Brings power to Europe
•Pooled Sovereignty

16.How are transnational advocacy networks changing the practice of international politics? Do they represent a fundamental force, or simply a minor detail?

•TAN’s Changing
oLobbying governments in favor of policies
•Human Rights Watch
•Compel gov’s with stats and publication
oHelp IO’s by setting int’l agendas before issues arise
•Give IO’s easy way to deal with problems
oProvide services
•Delivery of aid
•Red Cross
•Minor Detail
oAlthough they help to do these things, they can be done by larger IO’s if required
oDoes give voice to those in need
oHelps to lighten the load for IO’s so they can focus on more important problems at hand.

17. What are the major approaches to international ethics? [What are the main problems with applying each approach in practice?]

18. Will environmental problems lead to greater cooperation or increased conflict in the international system; or will they have little effect? [why?]

•Conflict
oStart out as attempted cooperation
oFinger pointing is inevitable
oGet defensive and feel targeted
oStates take sides over restrictions
•Kyoto Protocol
•Reduces greenhouse gas emissions
•U.S. refused to sign b/c of fossil fuel usage

19. What are the links between international environmental problems and economic development?

•To Fix Environmental Problems, you have to cut back on things that are more efficient, or spend unnecessary money to do things a different “greener” way
•Tragedy of the commons
oShared resources over consumed, but every state needs them to sustain economic growth/stability
•Oil shortages are due to the fact that we have produced more than we can support
•Too many cars for amnt of oil
•Export Led Growth
oProduces high quantity of scrap or waste
oRecycling is expensive
oHow are countries supposed to make money if they have to spend money to keep it clean?

20.How is “security” being redefined in the contemporary world?

•Discussion of what constitutes a security threat
•When something is defined as a security issue, it is implicitly given higher priority
•Terrorism now included as a threat to security
•Securitization: the process in which an issue that didn’t used to be thought of as a security issue is now a security issue
oChanges the scope of possible responses
oExample: U.S. military spending lots of time and money to combat disease in Africa→sees this as a preventative measure to societal breakdown

21. How does globalization facilitate transnational crime?

•Borders provide safe havens for criminals; different jurisdictions within different borders
•Globalization helps money laundering→fast movement of money throughout banks around the world
•Globalization is good for smuggling →easier to hide contraband when so many things are moving around the world

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what does investor restriction mean?

Question by caliman316: what does investor restriction mean?
The “Make Home Affordable Plan” is only available to borrowers who are either past due on their mortgage and/or are current but the value of the home is actually less than the amount you owe.

It doesn’t sound like Fannie Mae is the actual servicer of your loan. First thing you need to find out who actually services your loan.

Investor Restriction refers to the actual investor that owns your loan. When you take out a mortgage you go through a bank, but once the loan is complete the bank sells it through a process called “securitization”, and it becomes part of a Mortgage Backed Security that trades in the bond market. Whoever purchases the MBS that contains your bond is now the investor. Generally, there is a contract between the servicer and the investor that states what kind of actions
the servicer is allowed to take. There is some flexibility but at the end of the day the investor has control over what loans in the security do. If the investor feels that the act is not in their best interest they can restrict the action.

If Bank of America tells you that the loan is investor restricted it means the investor and servicer of your loan have not signed a contract to participate in the “Make Home Affordable Program”. You can find more in depth information at the link provided below

I got this answer a few hours ago which was very informative according to the reply i had to find out who services my loan. I make my mortgage payments to bank of america which i assume is the one servicing my loan and is backed by fannie mae/freddie mac. If I bank of america is not servicing my loan then why am i making payments to them? If I call bank of america would they actually tell me who is servicing my loan or will they just say it’s them so they won’t disclose who it actually is? I appreciate your responses

Best answer:

Answer by financegal27
If you make your payments to BofA then your servicer is likely Bank of America, if they aren’t servicing the loan then they definitely can tell you who is and it should be included on your statement. They are required by law to tell you this information, see the link below for more info:
http://www.hud.gov/offices/hsg/sfh/res/rightsmtgesrvcr.cfm

Bank of America should be able to tell you who owns the loan as well the website for the program does state that only loans owned by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac are eligible for home affordable refinancing, it does not sound like that’s the case here and its probably why you don’t qualify because you are looking to refinance and you aren’t passed due so you don’t qualify for the modification program which is a little more flexible. You can check to see if your loan is owned by Fannie or Feddie here:
http://www.makinghomeaffordable.gov/loan_lookup.html

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Since a new economists’ study traces the roots of the Recession to the 90s, is Clinton more to blame than Bush?

Question by Richard RIGHT: Since a new economists’ study traces the roots of the Recession to the 90s, is Clinton more to blame than Bush?
This study says it all comes down to there being nothing to back inter-bank loans: “The REPO market of interbank loans had always existed but it grew dramatically in the 1990s to support securitization. But since there was no deposit insurance for institutional loans measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, counterparties demanded collateral to back these overnight REPO loans that generally replaced demand deposits in the banking system.”

http://www.housingwatch.com/2010/02/26/it-wasnt-a-mortgage-recession-after-all-so-why-dont-we-feel-b/?icid=main|main|dl1|link3|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.housingwatch.com%2F2010%2F02%2F26%2Fit-wasnt-a-mortgage-recession-after-all-so-why-dont-we-feel-b%2F

Best answer:

Answer by Paul Grass™
Absolutely he is, so is the Democratic controlled congress

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Should Obama replace Timothy Geithner with Paul Krugman as Treasury Secretary?

Question by Julius S: Should Obama replace Timothy Geithner with Paul Krugman as Treasury Secretary?
In the deregulation-minded Reagan era, old-fashioned banking was increasingly replaced by wheeling and dealing on a grand scale. The new system was much bigger than the old regime: On the eve of the current crisis, finance and insurance accounted for 8 percent of G.D.P., more than twice their share in the 1960s. By early last year, the Dow contained five financial companies — giants like A.I.G., Citigroup and Bank of America.

And finance became anything but boring. It attracted many of our sharpest minds and made a select few immensely rich.

Underlying the glamorous new world of finance was the process of securitization. Loans no longer stayed with the lender. Instead, they were sold on to others, who sliced, diced and puréed individual debts to synthesize new assets. Sub-prime mortgages, credit card debts, car loans — all went into the financial system’s juicer. Out the other end, supposedly, came sweet-tasting AAA investments. And financial wizards were lavishly rewarded for overseeing the process.

But the wizards were frauds, whether they knew it or not, and their magic turned out to be no more than a collection of cheap stage tricks. Above all, the key promise of securitization — that it would make the financial system more robust by spreading risk more widely — turned out to be a lie. Banks used securitization to increase their risk, not reduce it, and in the process they made the economy more, not less, vulnerable to financial disruption.

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/133775/krugman%3A_the_market_wizards_were_exposed_as_frauds_–_too_bad_obama%27s_team_still_believes_in_their_magic/
Attention Ditto Heads: This is a serious question, so please treat it as such. I recognize that Lush Rimbaugh has been trashing Timothy Geithner, but Lush is negative for negative sake, not because he wants to make America better.
Attention: Obamabots, Barack Obama has shown that his Wall Street buddies are more important than America’s best interest. If that weren’t true, Barack Obama would not have waited almost 3 months: to propose regulating credit default swaps that were specifically unregulated by Phil Gramm and the Republican Cabal of Reagan Devolutionists; to reinstate the 70 year old SEC Uptick Rule requiring shortseller stock market manipulators to sell at higher stock prices; to return the power to bankruptcy court judges to renegotiate first mortgages and cram down sub-prime mortgages and underwater mortgages for all honest Americans.

Best answer:

Answer by Isabella
Debate it on disagreewithobama.com

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Why is the US economy so bad?

Question by NONAME: Why is the US economy so bad?
I heard that it was because of the Jews.

Best answer:

Answer by simplicitus
Boy, those Jews must be pretty stupid. If I had that kind of power, I’d pull a Dr. Evil and demand a ransom NOT to destroy the U.S. economy. Surely the U.S. would rather pay several hundred billion dollars to avoid a recession rather than spend more than a trillion dollars to fix it once it was broken.

Actually, you have a choice of blaming Congress and the politicians or the financial services industry that bribed them. The root cause was the lack of regulation of several aspects of the financial industry, including derivatives trading and the securitization of mortgages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-2000s_recession
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_conservative_origins_of_the_subprime_mortgage_crisis

Was President Bush Jewish? How about your two senators and your congress-critter (How did they vote when financial regulation came up in Congress – the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act for one – or don’t you know?)

If you want to listen rather than read, I can suggest:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=365
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=375
If you prefer reading:
http://baselinescenario.com/financial-crisis-for-beginners/

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English text correction – Social Sciences?

issue by Leane : English text correction – Social Sciences
Someone could correct this short and / or text to suggestions for improvement? “Spurred by increased opposed the liberal West to fundamentalist groups since 9/11 violent ideological and physical conflict, the first decade of the 21st century has seen an impressive increase in the fear of the other. As a direct result, many immigrants Western host societies have responded by implementing restrictive immigration, integration and citizenship policies. scholars have marked this policy change a “retreat from multiculturalism”, the “return of assimilation” and “securitization of citizenship.” This research examines recent changes in policies .. in Canada, the United States and Europe, focuses on issues related to citizenship and naturalization main research questions of this project are the following: How can countries that receive immigrants face tension oppose their national identity historically developed and expression of diversity ethnic due to immigration? through their policies and practices in recent citizenship, are these companies contribute to constructive change identities or are they reinforce the disconnect between citizens and foreigners, what are the costs of these attitudes ? to the research process, these issues will be broken into a number of sub-questions: What are the advantages and disadvantages for the host societies have included immigrants socially How important issues of identity in optimization of “living together” What are the main factors that affect the social inclusion of selected immigrants and their families: cultural openness, access to citizenship, economic opportunities, adapting institutions their differences and needs Where would appropriate environments for immigrants to develop a sense of commitment in the host society: ethnic associations, NGOs, workplace, educational institutions, informal recreational space Finally, how? can host companies participate constructively in this process “Thank you Best answer:

response Warsilver
I do not know what you want. As a very casual opening statement, it is absolutely perfect. But if you write an essay, this layout for an introduction would be ugly. One suggestion might be to cut the question marks and make the most evocative phrases. Eg “What are the advantages and disadvantages for the host societies of immigrants who included socially?” could be “immigrants have included socially has advantages and disadvantages for the host societies that I intend to explore further.” Also, for a mission that is, you may want to focus specifically on one country and a unique part of the company, because with all these themes that you would keep writing forever to cover everything in verbose mode.

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