Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

No it wouldn't. At most, it would have meant that instead of Citi, for example, doing it themselves they would have sold their loans to non-banks like Bear, Lehman, and Merrill.

Don't hold your breath. It's one thing to say it, but it's not happening.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Comfort > Liberty. That ship sailed long ago. Most of this country thinks the NSA is a misspelling of the NBA. Snowden's a forward who went to play in the Russian league.

Clueless, moronic rabble - that's your typical American. He doesn't give a damn about his privacy. Hell, he wants to give it up, to collect the most likes of his buddies on FB!

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

To be honest, I have never been a huge fan of the National Review. It skewed a bit Establishment for my taste. It didn't offend me, and I would read it in a doctor's office or someplace like that, but it wouldn't be my first choice. I actually hold it in much higher esteem after their anti-Trump issue, which caused them to lose the sponsorship of a GOP debate. I read the Weekly Standard, which is similar in tone, but that is because I have a gift subscription. I probably wouldn't subscribe on my own. I am not a Rush listener, but from what I understand his show is now The Trump Show featuring Rush Limbaugh. Breitbart used to be respectable, but had evealed itself to be Trumpbart well before the Michelle Fields incident. Andrew Breitbart is probably turning over in his grave.

I used to be an avid reader of Drudge, but that has been entirely replaced in my list of favorites with Redstate, which is decidedly #NeverTrump. Most of the Fox News personalities on the Trump bandwagon were buffoons before (Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Eric Bolling, Andrea Tantaros, O'Reilly), so that has just made those personalities even more unpalatable.

I always considered Beck a loon, but have given him a second glance because of his anti-Trump position. I still don't care to listen to him personally, but TheBlaze now supplants Redstate. Mr. Chick recently subscribed to the Conservative Review.

There has been a fairly substantial shift in my consumption of conservative media, and I do not think I can ever go back. It is an unfathomable that I could trust a source that I know supported *him*.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

I'll talk more about UBS, the Chase settlement, and carried interests on Monday. My analysis won't be the perfect curry. But it will be a pretty good gumbo.

For now, it's enough to say that the reason we have carried interests is because rich people don't like to pay taxes and they have the money to buy Congressmen and Presidents to ensure they don't have to.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

These all still strike me as insubstantial pap for the ideological. There's not much published by any of them where someone like me might read them and learn something more than some blowhard's opinion.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

There's no need to buy the Dems who advocate for it. It benefits their districts. If you raised enormous sums for these people from pure-as-silk Bernie donors, who are not insignificant portions of the vote in their districts, they'd still vote for it.

I say this as a Dem in a Dem state that would eliminate carried interests in a second. And one who is active in trying to figure out how to get techies and VCs to give to Dems (they're very stingy constituencies when it comes to political giving).

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

You should give the Weekly Standard a chance, it's fairly nuanced and policy wonkish (and was the source of the article I posted about Hamilton yesterday). If for no other reason, their book review section may turn you on to something worthy of attention.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/issue

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Not unless that's on the ballot. And it isn't this time.

I am way sympathetic to the lefties who want more fundamental change. But it takes a lot of work. If you want that on the ballot, you have to get that on the ballot.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Yes, I meant Congress matters too, not instead.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

How does the carried interest benefit any congressional district? All it does is allow wealthy people to avoid paying income and employment tax on their compensation. The rest of the taxpayers are further burdened by having to make up the revenue shortfall through higher taxes on their significantly lower incomes.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

It's pretty simple. The venture capitalists all live in Massachusetts and California and to a lesser extent New York.

The economy here is heavily dependent on the Venture investors. If you walk down Mass. Ave. in Cambridge or drive down Route 128 or visit any office park in the state, you will see endless numbers of buildings with names on them filled with people who are there because of venture capital.

So even if they are incredibly chintzy political donors, and the political views of the average venture capitalist tend to be a fairly bizarre macho libertarianism that makes most politicians either smirk or squirm, no one wants to do anything political that kills whatever keeps those geese laying these golden eggs we see all around us.

So, you get the states that ought to lead the charge against carried interest on ideological grounds fighting against it on practical grounds.

And if you chart out who gets those tax breaks and where they live, they'll live here, not in Alabama.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

This is not correct.

The culprit was the steady move from the halfway reasonable greed we used to endure on Wall Street to full-on, grab absolutely everything and fuck everyone else approach that we currently suffer through. The rewriting of a law which removed the ban on outright gambling which enabled assholes to take out insurance on assets they never came close to owning combined with the greed and idiocy of banks who were paying themselves irresponsibly large bonuses on the premiums on those insurance products that they never thought they'd have to pay out and on which they did absolutely zero research was the problem. Combine that with the fact that Republicans have steadily reduced our ability to police anyone on Wall Street by eliminating departments who were already overwhelmed trying to catch the most sophisticated crooks in the world and mix it with banks who were knowingly selling piles of shit that they forced rating agencies to rate as triple A if they wanted to keep their business. Sprinkle in the fact that they created the market for those products and overlooked the massive fraud created by the oversized demand that was going on at every level below (from mortgage brokers to the local banks who bought them) and you have a recipe for the crash.

It wasn't about wage stagnation. I suppose you can add that the shift of the right wing pitch of the American dream from a picket fence and 2.5 white children to "Everyone can be Trump, and when you make it, you won't want to pay taxes" assisted the rich take even more of the pie. Hell, the fact that we let Walmart put every small business out of business and then scream bloody murder when we try to introduce legislation to take care of the people who now have to work and shop there. We all subsidize Walmart's criminally low pay by providing their employees with healthcare, food stamps, and other care. All that may have something to do with wage stagnation, but wage stagnation and personal debt levels did not create the great recession.

You act like we haven't gutted our unions and neglected our minimum wage. Those are the things that lift all boats. You put money in the hands of those who will spend it and will get spent.

This may be true. But if we continue to shit all over our educational system, the people doing the innovating and owning will be in other countries.

Or we can blame them for the elaborate fraud they pulled and actually hold them responsible. Of course it won't mean a thing because the risk-reward analysis for any rational human being in the current bonus culture is a very easy and predictable one.

You are definitely mainly correct on this.

TM

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Why won't my people joust at windmills? The other side is jousting at windmills!! WHERE ARE MY FUCKING WINDMILL-JOUSTERS????

You do realize that, in a Republican-controlled House, those bills wouldn't even get out of committee -- don't you?

You apparently do not realize that lining up Democrats to say "Yes, we passed ACA, the biggest expansion of public benefits in decades. But it's shitty and we hate it!!!!" would not be very smart.



Which were the bills on which Republicans needed Democratic votes?

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

You don't have to vote for Hillary, just like my moronic cousin doesn't have to vote for anyone other than Trump.

At least he understands what he's doing. And he's a moron.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

What about Coulter? I seem to remember you being one of the right-wingers who rubbed off to thoughts of that shriveled bitch, but this goes back years and I could be thinking of someone else.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Wonk, you are absolutely wrong on this issue.

During Glass-Steagall, there were commercial banks and there were investment banks. Their assets could not be mixed. If Glass-Steagall were in place through the 2000s, every single I-bank would have gone down because they would have been buying and holding the shit products that destroyed the economy. The point that you are missing is that they wouldn't have had any assets to balance their toxic holdings, the government would not have been able to infuse enough money to keep all of them afloat and they all would have gone down, bringing the commercial banks with them as there would be a massive, universal run on all of the banks.

What you're saying above about Glass-Steagall is just misguided.

No argument here.

No. You are not. You are expecting miracles. Whether the Republicans block any and all legislation relating to healthcare through control of Congress or through the filibuster, what you're looking for will. not. happen. You can expect your Democratic politicians to move mountains all you want. But you need to open your eyes to the political realities in this country.

Ah. I see. We should send our representatives to Congress to do pointless, unattainable shit. This is the most ridiculous thing you've said so far.

Maybe that's because Hillary is pragmatic and Bernie, though I love him, is running on a completely unachievable pie-in-the-sky platform.

I will defer to you on this point since it's your area of expertise. But, again, why wouldn't you approach this issue from a "Let's push Hillary on the points we think are important, rather than, I give up. Let Trump burn it to the ground" perspective? You expect all these things from your candidate, but don't think we need to take any responsibility for pushing them once they're in office?

You're really not making a lot of sense on this stuff.

TM

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Damn. Did I miss the meeting?

TM

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

But again, they aren't paying taxes, but they are a drain on resources. They eliminate jobs, they don't create them. I suppose the luxury goods market and fine-dining restaurants benefit. But for the rest of the state, they're sucking tit, not filling up the jugs.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

What torture are you talking about?

I really want to ask you a serious question. Let's take a scale from 1 to 100. Do you think that domestic surveillance (which I believe has never been below a 30 on that scale) will not go from what it is now--let's say 40--to 80 or 90 under Cruz or Trump?

Never mind. Don't answer.

What I don't understand about you is that you probably have a list of 100 issues that are important to you, some quite obviously more than others. What you're telling me is that if Democrats, as a party, do not nominate a candidate that holds the same position as you on 90%, but is closer to 82%, you're going to take your ball and go home and let the person who agrees with you on 4% of your issues control this country? Is there any other aspect of your life where this works for you?

TM

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

I think when GGG said this -- "If you walk down Mass. Ave. in Cambridge or drive down Route 128 or visit any office park in the state, you will see endless numbers of buildings with names on them filled with people who are there because of venture capital" -- he did not mean the buildings were full of VCs, but that they are full of VC-backed companies.

If VC-backed companies are eliminating jobs, I will have trouble understanding why California is doing so well, and the Bay Area in particular booming, over recent years.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

I have never liked Ann Coulter. She has always done the cause of conservatives more harm than good. It is hard for me to even discuss her without using the sorts of words that I try to abstain from using to describe other women.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Under Glass-Steagall, the commercial banks would have been limited in the amount of toxic assets they could hold. They also would have been barred from selling anything but whole loans because they were barred from underwriting securities. The I-banks would have hit the shitter, but the commercial banks would not have.

And I would say fine, vote Hilary and push her for tax reform, but she's backing the kind of tax cuts I oppose. The same ones the Republicans are, just on a slightly smaller scale.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

From where I sit, Hilary and I stand together on about 20% of the issues I hold important. I've also said as we get closer to November, I'll be taking a closer look at where she stands on many of these issues. I may very well conclude she's someone I can vote for. I'm not there now. And quite frankly, I'm pretty fucking sick if getting browbeaten about it by a bunch of my friends, people I try to respect because of their willingness to make allowance for independent thought. Right now, I'm feeling like the fucking yahoos on Facebook are more tolerant of different views and it really fucking skeeves me out.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Incorrect. Yes, commercial banks would have held none of the products (other than the actual mortgages, which were a tiny piece of the problem and which would have been sold to I-banks anyway) that dragged the economy down. It's the next step that you apparently cannot or are refusing to hear.

With no Glass Steagall:
The assets of the mega commercial/I-banks' commercial side provided the stability that allowed the government to force some mergers and infuse some money that kept the financial system from completely collapsing.

With Glass Steagall:
The large I-banks who would have zero access to commercial bank assets would have been completely beyond repair. The government would not have had enough money to prop them up. Every single one of them would have blown up and the result of that explosion would have brought down every single commercial bank. And that's because there would have been no confidence in the financial system anywhere, so it would not have mattered that those commercial banks were not a part of the I-banks.

The fact that commercial banks were allowed to merge with I-banks reduced the damage of the '07 crash in that the commercial bank assets provided them with the stability they needed to limp through the crisis.

Change her mind. You keep talking about all this fighting you want people in office to do. But you're willing to throw your hands up and walk away if your candidate doesn't win?

TM

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Oh stop with the whining. You are saying things that don't make a ton of sense. We are calling you on it in our entirely greedy board-specific annoying way that hasn't changed since we first started posting.

If you tell me you'll revisit her positions come November, that's cool with me. If you decide to stay home after that point, I can't say I'd respect that, but obviously you can do whatever the hell you want. But when Trump or Cruz wins and destroys every single aspect of this country you love and respect, I'd prefer not to read any posts from you about it.

TM

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Huh?

I think you are thinking about the people who used to buy and breakup old-industry companies and "reengineer" them - the Mitt Romney's of the world.

I'm thinking about the companies that started with 3 people in a garage and are now thousands globally that make up the core of the Mass. and California economies. They hire lots of people.

The Mitt Romneys of the world pretty much finished dismantling industrial America a while ago, as you can tell from Bain Capital having moved re-engineered itself and moved most of its business into other lines. I'll bet you feel deeply for all the severed buy-out specialists who were terminated.

Also, what Sidd Said.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

You did. I thought it went well. The vote to ban you did not pass (Hank and I voted for, everyone else against), but we passed a resolution declaring that sometimes you are mean. We also passed a resolution supporting taking the $100 bill out of circulation, which we will send to the Federal Reserve under Sebastian's name.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

As Hank well knows, and SEC Chick too, everyone here is actually pretty tolerant of views we consider idiotic. We're just not real quiet about those views.

I look forward to what you have to say on UBS (and Chase, which I've paid almost no attention to -- I pay attention to UBS in part because I have some Swiss UBS friends who avoided entering the country for several years -- they absolutely despite Hillary). I hope you look forward to my entirely sensible ridicule of whatever you say.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

You guys are getting things done. No motions to tax hedge funds assholes introduced?

TM

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I made a motion to tax assholes, period, but Hank shot it down.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

You are not a mod{sad face}. You asked me to make the motion. I brought two copies. flower shat on one and covered it up with the other.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Flower tried to explain it, but unfortunately Wonk isn't a mod, so I don't think we fully grasped the need for it.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Whew. Good to know I was thinking of someone else.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Just some earthy funk for Friday's Daily Dose. The Soul Lifter's "Hot, Funky, and Sweaty." I know nothing about the Soul Lifters other than they have a song called "Hot, Funky, and Sweaty." All good, as far as I am concerned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--dFmaPG98c

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

We all still love you. Some of us just think you are very wrong, and this has always been a place where you can say that to someone in a direct, frequently blunt, sometimes caustic, occasionally homicidal-thought-inducing, way.

It's like a "safe space," but without the milk-and-cookies.

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Beyond the general run, even in Glass-Steagall Land, don't the commercial banks all hold a lot of I-bank commercial paper and the like that's going to hit them pretty hard directly?

Re: As the choppers hover outside my window
 

Read this: http://content.time.com/time/busines...723152,00.html

Commercial banks pre-Glass Steagall may have purchased some protection through a credit default swap for positions they held on traditional assets, but they wouldn't have been offering them as insurers and making them part of their business and fucking holding them to collect the premiums.* The multiples upon multiples of bets taken is what made the impact of the CDO failures so much bigger than it should have been.

TM

*Hell, they wouldn't have acted as insured (purchasers of the swaps) either given their business model--except for maybe as actual insurance on a traditional asset. That's part of why Wonk isn't entirely wrong and why I said before that when I-banks took over the consumer banks after mergers, the people running these banks came from the big money, speculation side, not the consumer banking side. Risk, risk, risk. The opposite of what a consumer bank should be doing.

Hi
 

I'm Negan.

http://1428elm.com/files/2015/03/Negan_Lucille.jpg

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Daily posts that all look/sound the same get more views if there are titties involved, or so NotBob told me:P:cool:

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

So, this is what I think Wonk was getting at - http://theweek.com/articles/615382/h...litany-scandal . And I get y'alls point - we should pull the lever for Mussolini.