Done, no green.

Done

Done. ng, ng.

drwho obviously, and you're right in as far as the banks had worked out dubious practices of getting others to take the hit. That's where govt regulation comes in. The US regulators allowed them to do it. Tightening up on lending criteria is sensible and prudent. In the US it was way too slack.

No, it was the implicit promise of a bailout. In 2006 when Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac started buying bad debt in earnest the banks started writing more bad debt. Most of the sub-prime debt that defaulted was written after 2006.

go

Actually it was sub-prime mortgages Fanny and Freddie started buying. So the banks got sloppy with their sub-prime mortgages because they could unload them on Fanny and Freddie.

obviously, and thats very much part of the lack of regulation keeping them in check. Sub primes should never have been allowed, simple.

start

done, ng

No its not obvious. What regulation is going to catch banks making bad mortgages? No regulators are going to go over all the loans banks make to see which ones are bad.

Sub-primes are a way for poorer credit risks to borrow money. Something I thought you favored. Normally higher interest is charged to compensate for the greater risk of default. But banks normally do their homework and keep the default rates on sub-prime mortgages within expectations. That did not happen after 2006 because there was no free market reason to do it. All the banks had to do was write the mortgages and unload them on Fanny and Freddie.

Difficulty score 17. No green.

Jackt - Goldman Sachs took $10 billion in bailout money. So they were hurting.

If there hadn't been a bailout Goldman Sachs and Countrywide would have been finished. They deserved it, but we were told that it would take down the entire economy to let them fail.

done

I'm curious, drwho: Are there any lessons from other countries from which the US can learn? According to you, not banking (even though Australia and Canada avoided the huge problems of the US); not health care (even though health care is less expensive, and the outcomes better, in most other industrialized countries). Can America learn from anyone?

Add to the list, drwho: gun control (although the industrialized world that controls guns has far fewer deaths by guns).

Education (we're lagging far behind).

There are many who believed that instead of giving the irresponsible lenders the bailout they should have given the mortgage holders the money to be used to pay their mortgages. They money still would have gone to the lenders but the people would not have been hurt.

Instead the lenders many of whom knew the loans were going to fail took out insurance against their failure. This is what caused the crash. Not enough money to cover the insurance payments.

The largest bank heist in the history of the world.

genius

We lag behind in education on purpose. An educated electorate would never put up with the bullshit they are being fed.

But as the old IWW saying goes "If elections changed anything, they wouldn't let us vote."

I am going to stop chatting about politics. My last post will be this. My countries history is rife with privatizing the profits and socializing the losses.

Dr. Who, GSCO took bailout money, yes. However the banks paid TARP back... but not before they poured it into the stock market and propped themselves up. GSCO declared themselves an investment bank, along with JP Morgan Chase and a few others in order to qualify for TARP funds, but they wear multiple hats not the least of which are acting as brokers between the real banks and the central banks and raking I believe 3% off every transaction they enabled. 10 billion? Pennies, and only the tip of the iceberg. Our pols have no clue how banks work and they don't want to know.

Tuco, the monetary system confuses us when it unites GDP and the benefits from our future labor in the form of promissory notes and mortgages. How do we reconcile the two? One's a tangible asset, the other isn't. Trump figured it out. I like him. He proved he can take celebrity retreads and make them valuable to themselves again when they work for something meaningful.

ng,ng

Anyone have blueprints for a bomb shelter? I'll return them, promise...

done

go

donre

*done*

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ding

Maybe these will work for you
http://www.survivalring.org/downloads/dow\nnloads-set-three/

Bad link. You probably mean:
http://www.survivalring.org/downloads/d\nownloads-set-three/

That's not the link I entered. Server problem? The URL should end with downloads-set-three

EZPZ. 10.