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Post by HawksStock on Apr 4, 2009 9:37:58 GMT -6
they call it the obama deception, but it should probably just be called the deception.
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Post by HawksStock on Apr 4, 2009 11:00:03 GMT -6
This is a really long vid, please go to 1hr 12 min and watch about 5 min., and you'll completely understand the libertarian outcry, whether your libertarian or not.
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Post by HawksStock on Apr 4, 2009 11:21:30 GMT -6
Any of you watched this the whole way through, now tell me why banning assault rifles is ok.
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Post by NOTTHOR on Apr 5, 2009 9:17:40 GMT -6
Have you or any of the guys responsible for making that video been tested by a medical professional for paranoid schizophrenia?
There are a lot of bold statements in that, but what is the evidence for them? I only watched around the 1:12 mark and noted several claims that I believe are lacking evidentiary support or are wrong.
"The Federal Reserve bought most of the Fortune 500." Really? That's strange, when you check the share ownership of large companies, they seem to be fairly widely held by institutional investors on behalf of mutual funds. I don't think the Federal Reserve will show up on any ownership table.
The banks "orchestrated the destruction of the western nation's economies." Yep, okay.
They "removed the Glass-Stegall Act." Shouldn't libertarians be in favor of the abolition of this Act? The Act is anti-freedom. I know that when I walk into US Bank and see that they are offering auto insurance for sale, I shudder at the thought of my bank selling car insurance. The horror.
"In late 2007, the banks badmouthed the scams they had created. Later, the bankers cut off the tsunami of fiat money." Um, not quite. Why the hell would the banks badmouth the schemes they had created? And the Fed took extraordinary actions to pump liquidity into the market in late 2007. A huge reason for the oil spike was that the Fed was pumping in liquidity and cutting rates before any other country did so. This pissed on the value of the dollar and caused a commodity spike. The tsunami of credit did not come from the banks, it came from purchasers of asset backed securities. Once the buyers of those securities got nervous and stopped buying them, the credit market froze. If the banks had a choice between being wards of the state and returning to 2006 level profitability, which do you think they would choose?
The government gave "$700 billion to the banks." No, the government made preferred stock investments with a 5% dividend. Go through EDGAR, you can see the contracts for the investments.
"$9.7 trillion disappeared into a blackhole." Source? Oh, it must have been the article entitled "US Taxpayers Risk $9.7 Trillion on Bailout Programs." I guess I can see how someone suffering from an acute case of paranoid schizophrenia who was not wearing a tinfoil hat could mistakenly think "risk" and "blackhole" have the same meaning.
"Where the money is going is a secret." No, you can go on EDGAR and see all the contracts for preferred stock investments, term loan facilities and guarantee agreements.
"Banks are hoarding the money." Banks have regulators on one hand telling them they need to bolster capital reserves and that they are not to originate any new loans. On the other hand, they have Congress telling them to make more loans. What the hell are they supposed to do? Lend the money to Chrysler?
You see, movies like this impute a far higher standard of intelligence to bankers than they deserve. These people think that a banker will make billions of dollars of loans that go bad on purpose, like Citibank wants to lose billions due to its exposure to Chrysler or something. They fail to account for the fact that the guys running the banks are for the most part, idiots.
Case in point, it is proxy season right now. Yesterday I was reading through my Citigroup proxy materials. When I got to the risk management committee section, I noticed an interesting name, Andrew Liveris, CEO of Dow. Who is this guy? Well, I'd say he is perhaps one of the most colossal dumbshits of all time for nearly killing Dow.
He signed a merger agreement with Rohm & Haas at a hugely inflated price in the 3rd quarter of 2008. It was an all cash transaction. Problem was, Dow didn't have any cash to close the deal. They were relying on the Kuwaiti government to close a joint venture transaction in which the Kuwaitis would pump $9 billion into Dow. Liveris signed the agreement with Rohm & Haas without any way to back out if Dow got fucked by the Kuwaitis. Guess what. The Kuwaitis fucked Dow. Dow was on the brink of bankruptcy 2 weeks ago because this guy was such a poor risk manager that he gave his company no way out of the Rohm & Haas deal. He got really god damned lucky that the controlling family made an investment back into Dow, or else Dow would be in BK today.
Liveris is on the Board of Citibank and one of the members of their risk management committee. The guy clearly knows jack shit about risk management, he damn near killed the company that he runs through shitty risk management. And then as his part time job, he is supposed to oversee risk management on a $2 trillion portfolio of assets. Do you see where I'm going here? I don't think these guys are nearly as smart as the creators of your video give them credit for being. They are just lemmings who follow each other over a cliff. Same shit happens just about every 10 years, like clockwork. '87 crash and CMO blowups. '97 Asian crisis and '98 blowup of LTCM. '07-'09 crash. There is a business cycle and these guys just do a pisspoor of planning for any downturn in that business cycle.
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