***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[rico x hood]

100k people in the right place put him in office, most people that voted didn't want him to be president.

Stop acting like he has a mandate from the people.

And you're really trying to put the housing crisis just on Clinton . What garbage

He does have a mandate. He blew passed 270. And that popular vote number is mainly from California. Which she was ALWAYS going to win. Now if those votes were dispersed throughout the country you MIGHT be in the region of a valid point.

 

[Rootin4EverybodyBlack]

100k people in the right place put him in office, most people that voted didn't want him to be president.

Stop acting like he has a mandate from the people.

And you're really trying to put the housing crisis just on Clinton . What garbage

Can't repeat this enough. I'll accept he won the electoral college, but let's please stop pretending he's "what the people wanted". That's just factually inaccurate.

 

[rico x hood]

It would've still happened, Wall Street always finds a way. It's not like ARM loans were created after the repeal of Glass-Steagall nor the creation of the tranches that they were buried in. They were playing that dirty game well before the repeal in '99

I said it wouldn't have been as bad. And the Great Recession might just have been the recession.

 

[RustyShackleford]

100k people in the right place put him in office, most people that voted didn't want him to be president.

Stop acting like he has a mandate from the people.

And you're really trying to put the housing crisis just on Clinton . What garbage

He does have a mandate. He blew passed 270. And that popular vote number is mainly from California. Which she was ALWAYS going to win. Now if those votes were dispersed throughout the country you MIGHT be in the region of a valid point.

Rico, please use Google. Trump's electoral college win, and popular vote numbers are not that great. He is in the bottom quarterly of election winners.

And you're a hypocrite. Because you never say Obama had a mandate, especially after 2012, when he got more EC votes than Trump.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...rump-electoral-college-popular-vote.html?_r=0

-The Cali thing is trash too because you can't just arbitrarily dismiss voters like that to fit your talking point.

 

[everysingletime]

Reacho, smh....

 

[ninjahood]

So because he's a businessman, it's ok for him to do these things because he's not a politician but by making him run for office and even winning makes him a politician. Yall dudes are somethin else man.

da public doesn't scrutinize businessmen making flips da way it does public officials self aggrandizing via Foundations.

 

[RustyShackleford]

It would've still happened, Wall Street always finds a way. It's not like ARM loans were created after the repeal of Glass-Steagall nor the creation of the tranches that they were buried in. They were playing that dirty game well before the repeal in '99

I said it wouldn't have been as bad. And the Great Recession might just have been the recession.

The Long Answer:

The biggest banks are a lot bigger than they once were, mostly because of mergers and acquisitions. What's not in dispute is that changes to Glass-Steagall allowed the biggest banks to grow bigger, which has raised new concerns about risks to the financial system.

At issue is the "too big to fail" problem: Will the federal government once again be forced to come to the aid of federally insured megabanks that have taken outsize risks with their money?

Since 2008, regulatory changes in the U.S. and abroad have supposedly mitigated that danger. The Dodd-Frank financial overhaul bill contains complicated provisions that would allow regulators to step in and take over failing banks, if necessary.

But there's plenty of skepticism that the changes have gone far enough.

Some critics, such as Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, have long seen the changes to Glass-Steagall as a major factor in the 2008 crash. By bringing "investment and commercial banks together, the investment bank culture came out on top," Stiglitz wrote in 2009. "There was a demand for the kind of high returns that could be obtained only through high leverage and big risk-taking."

But others, like former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, have said the focus on Glass-Steagall is misguided. They argue other factors were more important in causing the 2008 crisis, such as bad mortgage underwriting, poor work by the ratings agencies and a securitization market gone crazy. All of that would have happened no matter the size of the big banks.

In fact, some of the financial institutions that fared the worst, such as Bear Stearns, AIG, Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual, weren't part of large bank holding companies at all.

"I have often posed the following question to critics who claim that repealing Glass-Steagall was a major cause of the financial crisis: What bad practices would have been prevented if Glass-Steagall was still on the books?" wrote former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder. "I've yet to hear a good answer."

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona teamed up to sponsor a bill that would bring back Glass-Steagall-type restrictions.

It was never allowed to come up for a vote.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...lass-steagall-cause-the-2008-financial-crisis

Lawrence White, an economist at New York University, doesn’t see Glass-Steagall playing any role in the financial crisis whatsoever. He pointed to the crisis’ biggest culprits: firms such as Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and AIG, to name a few. He added that much of the crisis hinged on activity by these institutions that would have been possible with or without Glass-Steagall, such as mass investment in notoriously bad mortgage loans. (Clinton’s staff linked us to commentary by several other experts who share White’s view.)

We also contacted Barry Ritholtz, a wealth management expert and commentator, who said Glass-Steagall would have done nothing to stop the financial crisis, but not having it made the crisis worse. It encouraged banks to get bigger and to take on riskier investments, so the ripple effects of the crisis were bigger than they would have been otherwise, he said, adding that it wasn’t just the headline-making banks that struggled.

The extent over Glass-Steagall’s effect on the financial crisis is a topic on which reasonable people can disagree. More so in Clinton’s favor is the fact that Glass-Steagall was a shadow of its former self by the time 1999 rolled around.

Deregulating like it’s 1999

A few decades out from the Depression, starting in earnest in the 1970s, there was a push to roll back financial regulations that continued throughout the administrations of former presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. As part of that movement, banks and lawmakers steadily chipped away at Glass-Steagall and took advantage of loopholes. Banks were engaging in the kinds of activity Glass-Steagall was intended to stop even though the law was still on the books.

By the time Clinton signed the Financial Services Modernization Act, commonly known as Gramm-Leach-Bliley, repealing the key components of Glass-Steagall in 1999, the regulation was nearly toothless. The law was simply catching up to what the market had already accomplished in the previous 10 to 15 years, said Kathleen Day, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and an expert in financial crises.

Take for example the poster child of the end of Glass-Steagall: The merger of Citicorp, a bank, and Travelers Group, a financial conglomerate, was announced in 1998 before Glass-Steagall was repealed. Even though this was the exact type of merger Glass-Steagall was intended to halt, the financial industry did not see many obstacles for the creation of Citigroup.

"Citigroup and others wanted and got the repeal of Glass-Steagall in order to validate what they had already been allowed to do," said Simon Johnson, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

So the overall, decades-in-the-making decline of Glass-Steagall might have contributed to the financial crisis and its fallout, as it was part of the deregulatory push. But Clinton putting pen-to-paper on the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 probably didn’t make any meaningful difference.

But Clinton’s hands aren’t clean of the financial crisis, because his administration played no small part in the longer term deregulatory trend. Clinton and his administration did not make an earnest attempt to maintain oversight over the big, hybrid banks created by the demise of Glass-Steagall, Day said. Additionally, the administration’s firm decision not to regulate other aspects of the financial market played a meaningful role in the crisis -- for example, the absence of regulations regarding over-the-counter derivatives, which were becoming increasingly prevalent, despite internal warnings.

Clinton’s claim "might be technically true, but it’s a sin of omission," Day said.

Our ruling

Clinton said, "There's not a single, solitary example that" signing the bill to end Glass-Steagall "had anything to do with the financial crash."

By focusing on the bill that officially repealed Glass-Steagall, Clinton's statement ignores the fact that the demise of Glass-Steagall took place over decades, amid a deregulatory push in which the Clinton administration played a role. By the time the law to repeal hit his desk, Glass-Steagall had been whittled down so much that it wasn’t very meaningful. It's a matter of debate how much of a role the overall demise of Glass-Steagall had in causing the financial crisis, but we couldn't find any economists who argue that the regulation was the sole linchpin keeping the financial system stable until its official repeal in 1999. Overall, we rate Clinton’s claim Mostly True.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...linton-glass-steagall-had-nothing-do-financi/



Go study your econ some more pa, because even though there are good reason to bring back Glass-Steagall, you're not making one of them,

 

[Belgium]

i hope they go as left as you can dream... so then there's no excuses

Then I would also expect you don't give the current administration any excuses if they screw up (hopefully not), as they control all branches of government.

 

[titanium tea]

He does have a mandate. He blew passed 270. And that popular vote number is mainly from California. Which she was ALWAYS going to win. Now if those votes were dispersed throughout the country you MIGHT be in the region of a valid point.

Don led from start to finish and hill didnt even catch up when California came in.

California absolutely benefits from open borders the most. 

Its the place that pretty much founded all the silliness in every field.

It has too many ec votes lol

 

[rico x hood]

Rico, please use Google. Trump's electoral college win, and popular vote numbers are not that great. He is in the bottom quarterly of election winners.

And you're a hypocrite. Because you never say Obama had a mandate, especially after 2012, when he got more EC votes than Trump.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...rump-electoral-college-popular-vote.html?_r=0

-The Cali thing is trash too because you can't just arbitrarily dismiss voters like that to fit your talking point.

Your graph is irrelevant. The electoral votes are based on states population. They fluctuate. Your list literally had George Washington. Come on now. Your better than that.

And in our system the California "thing" is not arbitrary. All the Californians who voted for Hillary were adequately represented. Trump was represented by more people in the country. Boom. Mandate.

 

[ninjahood]

i hope they go as left as you can dream... so then there's no excuses

Then I would also expect you don't give the current administration any excuses if they screw up (hopefully not), as they control all branches of government.

I been said da don holds all da marbles now...

 

[AEA18]

http://www.salon.com/2016/12/19/hou...on-into-flint-water-crisis-blame-epa-instead/

These people are the worst!

 

[Belgium]

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaig...mittee-needed-to-investigate-russian-meddling

 
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a new interview that no select committee is needed to look into the Russian meddling in the US. presidential election.

McConnell in an interview that aired Monday with Kentucky Educational Television described Russian hacking as a "serious issue," according to The Washington Examiner.

But it "doesn't require" a special committee, he added.

"We have a Senate Intelligence Committee and a House Intelligence Committee, run by knowledgeable, responsible people," McConnell said. 
"There's no question that the Russians were messing around in our election. It is a matter of genuine concern and it needs to be investigated."

"In the Senate, we're gonna investigate that in what we call regular order," he said.

The Kentucky Republican said he thinks the Senate Intelligence Committee is "fully capable of handling this."

Some lawmakers are pushing for a select committee investigation into Moscow's meddling. They have been careful to cast calls for the probe as nonpartisan and focused on national security.
 
President-elect Donald Trump's team has blasted a CIA assessment that concluded Russia intervened in the election to help Trump win the presidency. Trump and his team have sought to cast the reports as "ridiculous" and an attempt to undermine the president-elect's win.
 
McConnell during the new interview said if Russia were trying to help elect Trump, they made a "bad investment."
 
"Because look at who he is picking for his Cabinet," he said, citing retired Gen. James Mattis and Rep. Mike Pompeo.
 
McConnell also defended Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Trump's nominee for secretary of State.
"I know Rex pretty well," he said. "He was representing his company — that was his job to be CEO of Exxon Mobil, one of the largest corporations in the world and they search for oil and gas all over the world."

"In many of those places, the government is not ones we are particularly fond of, so I thought he did an excellent job doing what he was hired at Exxon Mobile to do."

 

[Nike Jordan]

If aunt had a ****, she'd be my uncle.

 

[rico x hood]

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...lass-steagall-cause-the-2008-financial-crisis
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...linton-glass-steagall-had-nothing-do-financi/



Go study your econ some more pa, because even though there are good reason to bring back Glass-Steagall, you're not making one of them,

I was not proven wrong. I stated it would not have been that bad. Your bolded parts prove that.

And then there's this:

Some critics, such as Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, have long seen the changes to Glass-Steagall as a major factor in the 2008 crash. By bringing "investment and commercial banks together, the investment bank culture came out on top," Stiglitz wrote in 2009. "There was a demand for the kind of high returns that could be obtained only through high leverage and big risk-taking."

Thought I wouldn't read everything?

 

[Master Zik]

Rico talking economics again.

 

[RustyShackleford]

Other than complainng about

Rico, please use Google. Trump's electoral college win, and popular vote numbers are not that great. He is in the bottom quarterly of election winners.

And you're a hypocrite. Because you never say Obama had a mandate, especially after 2012, when he got more EC votes than Trump.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...rump-electoral-college-popular-vote.html?_r=0

-The Cali thing is trash too because you can't just arbitrarily dismiss voters like that to fit your talking point.

Your graph is irrelevant. The electoral votes are based on states population. They fluctuate. Your list literally had George Washington. Come on now. Your better than that.

And in our system the California "thing" is not arbitrary. All the Californians who voted for Hillary were adequately represented. Trump was represented by more people in the country. Boom. Mandate.

Ahh here comes the desperate deflecting. You could take your head out your *** and click the link and see the only Post War election winner that Trump has done better in is Bush Jr., and that is only for EC votes

And it is known that rural areas, and less populated states are disproportionately represented in EC votes, battleground states important further distorts the situation.

And your sentence makes no god damb sense, how the hell does Trump represented more of the people? You on some Stretch Armstrong Kellyanne Conway nonsense yo defend you papi.

100K votes in three states gave Trump the victory. Dude's approval rating is gonna be hanging on by a thread from day one.

 

[RustyShackleford]

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...lass-steagall-cause-the-2008-financial-crisis
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...linton-glass-steagall-had-nothing-do-financi/



Go study your econ some more pa, because even though there are good reason to bring back Glass-Steagall, you're not making one of them,

I was not proven wrong. I stated it would not have been that bad. Your bolded parts prove that.

And then there's this:

Some critics, such as Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, have long seen the changes to Glass-Steagall as a major factor in the 2008 crash. By bringing "investment and commercial banks together, the investment bank culture came out on top," Stiglitz wrote in 2009. "There was a demand for the kind of high returns that could be obtained only through high leverage and big risk-taking."

Thought I wouldn't read everything?

Because you're ignorant on economics, you don't realize what he is saying. He is not making a strictly economic argument Rico, he is saying that investment banking culture took over the industry, leading to more risk behavior. His argument is more behavioral finance than macro or monetary.

Glass-Steagall created condition that allowed a certain culture to dominate.

But I guess when some ignorant like yourself reads the word "economist", they might be confused as to what is being said.

GO BACK TO HITTING THE BOOKS!, you're showing your *** again.

Another embarrassment

 

[noskey]

Rico it's wayyyyyy more complicated than the repeal of Glass Stegal.

Which, as a republican, wouldn't you be all for deregulation? Why are you arguing the Glass Stegal act was beneficial? Do you not believe in a free market?!

 

[Nawzlew]

He does have a mandate. He blew passed 270. And that popular vote number is mainly from California. Which she was ALWAYS going to win. Now if those votes were dispersed throughout the country you MIGHT be in the region of a valid point.

Don led from start to finish and hill didnt even catch up when California came in.
California absolutely benefits from open borders the most. 
Its the place that pretty much founded all the silliness in every field.
It has too many ec votes lol

hardly.

us forward thinkers on the best coast stay getting anchored to the ground by these backward thinking states.

 

[rillo561]

Which, as a republican,

Wait for it...

 

[RustyShackleford]

This is the article Rico, here it is in context:

No. 2: Tearing Down the Walls

The deregulation philosophy would pay unwelcome dividends for years to come. In November 1999, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act—the culmination of a $300 million lobbying effort by the banking and financial-services industries, and spearheaded in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm. Glass-Steagall had long separated commercial banks (which lend money) and investment banks (which organize the sale of bonds and equities); it had been enacted in the aftermath of the Great Depression and was meant to curb the excesses of that era, including grave conflicts of interest. For instance, without separation, if a company whose shares had been issued by an investment bank, with its strong endorsement, got into trouble, wouldn’t its commercial arm, if it had one, feel pressure to lend it money, perhaps unwisely? An ensuing spiral of bad judgment is not hard to foresee. I had opposed repeal of Glass-Steagall. The proponents said, in effect, Trust us: we will create Chinese walls to make sure that the problems of the past do not recur. As an economist, I certainly possessed a healthy degree of trust, trust in the power of economic incentives to bend human behavior toward self-interest—toward short-term self-interest, at any rate, rather than Tocqueville’s “self interest rightly understood.”

The most important consequence of the repeal of Glass-Steagall was indirect—it lay in the way repeal changed an entire culture. Commercial banks are not supposed to be high-risk ventures; they are supposed to manage other people’s money very conservatively. It is with this understanding that the government agrees to pick up the tab should they fail. Investment banks, on the other hand, have traditionally managed rich people’s money—people who can take bigger risks in order to get bigger returns. When repeal of Glass-Steagall brought investment and commercial banks together, the investment-bank culture came out on top. There was a demand for the kind of high returns that could be obtained only through high leverage and big risktaking.

There were other important steps down the deregulatory path. One was the decision in April 2004 by the Securities and Exchange Commission, at a meeting attended by virtually no one and largely overlooked at the time, to allow big investment banks to increase their debt-to-capital ratio (from 12:1 to 30:1, or higher) so that they could buy more mortgage-backed securities, inflating the housing bubble in the process. In agreeing to this measure, the S.E.C. argued for the virtues of self-regulation: the peculiar notion that banks can effectively police themselves. Self-regulation is preposterous, as even Alan Greenspan now concedes, and as a practical matter it can’t, in any case, identify systemic risks—the kinds of risks that arise when, for instance, the models used by each of the banks to manage their portfolios tell all the banks to sell some security all at once.

As we stripped back the old regulations, we did nothing to address the new challenges posed by 21st-century markets. The most important challenge was that posed by derivatives. In 1998 the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born, had called for such regulation—a concern that took on urgency after the Fed, in that same year, engineered the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund whose trillion-dollar-plus failure threatened global financial markets. But Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, his deputy, Larry Summers, and Greenspan were adamant—and successful—in their opposition. Nothing was done.

Bringing back Glass Steagall is something we should support because it has many benefits for the the American public. But using it just to blame Bill Clinton for the Great Recession is a reach. Plain and simple

 

[seandon23]

Because you're ignorant on economics, you don't realize what he is saying. He is not making a strictly economic argument Rico, he is saying that investment banking culture took over the industry, leading to more risk behavior. His argument is more behavioral finance than macro or monetary.

Glass-Steagall created condition that allowed a certain culture to dominate.

But I guess when some ignorant like yourself reads the word "economist", they might be confused as to what is being said.

GO BACK TO HITTING THE BOOKS!, you're showing your *** again.

Another embarrassment

word i remember Blinder talking about that to some extent particularly in his book "When the Music Stopped" in my Macro Econ class 

 

[RustyShackleford]

He does have a mandate. He blew passed 270. And that popular vote number is mainly from California. Which she was ALWAYS going to win. Now if those votes were dispersed throughout the country you MIGHT be in the region of a valid point.

Don led from start to finish and hill didnt even catch up when California came in.
California absolutely benefits from open borders the most. 
Its the place that pretty much founded all the silliness in every field.
It has too many ec votes lol

-Actually California has a disproportional low number of EC votes. Because the total of EC votes is fixed, and every state is guaranteed at least 3.

-If Cali has benefited the most from open borders, then all states should be on board, because Cali is one of our best performing states economically.

-And the other stupid claims you didn't even have the knowledge to spell out, I won't waste my time on.

 

[rico x hood]

Other than complainng about
Ahh here comes the desperate deflecting. You could take your head out your *** and click the link and see the only Post War election winner that Trump has done better in is Bush Jr., and that is only for EC votes

And it is known that rural areas, and less populated states are disproportionately represented in EC votes, battleground states important further distorts the situation.

And your sentence makes no god damb sense, how the hell does Trump represented more of the people? You on some Stretch Armstrong Kellyanne Conway nonsense yo defend you papi.

100K votes in three states gave Trump the victory. Dude's approval rating is gonna be hanging on by a thread from day one.

I forgot to add the word across. Represented by more people across the country, not just forever blue California.

Senate, House, Executive, and majority of states headed by Republicans. That's a mandate in my book. For months they said Trump would be a drag on the GOP ticket but the people came out and proved the pundits wrong.