Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower (Post 501593)

Your numbingly stupid mantra that globalism somehow destroyed the working class, driving them into Trump's arms, is not only misguided, it is frankly immoral. It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower (Post 501597)

Thanks for the article recommendation. I'll take a look. Heck, if it contains some good stuff, I may even quote it (or the article it quotes) and pretend that I wrote it myself.

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski (Post 501605)

So, I didn't really listen in macroeconomics. When someone says the economy really did well under President ____, what is the implication? Is it spending to stimulate jobs/ cash flowing, or cutting back to fight down inflation? Or is the economy really not under anyone's real control?

What does a president really do?

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski (Post 501605)

So, I didn't really listen in macroeconomics. When someone says the economy really did well under President ____, what is the implication? Is it spending to stimulate jobs/ cash flowing, or cutting back to fight down inflation? Or is the economy really not under anyone's real control?

What does a president really do?

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy (Post 501584)

I think he's just described a bond offering actually rather than a commercial lending deal.

Works just fine, but not the only arrow in the quiver.

Originally Posted by taxwonk (Post 501600)

Precisely. It's done all the time with convertible daily resent preferred, which is nothin more than a cp derivative. I've also done deals over terms ranging from weekly to 45 years. And why is this so dramatically different than slicing up a securitization by credit risk, offering different returns for tranches with more or less risk.

Originally Posted by taxwonk (Post 501600)

In my scenario, the allocation of risk is determined by the return the lender is willing to accept. Risk is parceled out in accord with the interest premium if takes to fund each successive layer.

Originally Posted by taxwonk (Post 501600)

I've done this deal for 25 years, with investment banks and commercial banks, back when it made a difference, insurance companies, vc. and pe. Terms have been everything from overnight working capital to bridge financing, waste control tax-exempt products, and just because it was cheaper than straight debt or equity. I've done it as direct deals, packaged them as collateralized trusts, and floated them publicly. I've done tax-exempt and taxable, special purpose and general credit.

Originally Posted by taxwonk (Post 501600)

But what do I know. I'm just a simple country tax lawyer.

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall (Post 501610)

Good point.

It also ignores the fact that not every credit is one which every bank wants. But that doesn't matter. Do the smaller banks get to opt out of the shittier credits?

I think for the right deal, in the right situation, it could work. But there's no way it works if you force it on every deal.

TM

Originally Posted by taxwonk (Post 501601)

Ah, very good! And if you turn that into a metaphor...?

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall (Post 501614)

Given that I have generally changed my mind about what causes terror in the name of Islam, does anyone have thoughts on this?

The six attackers in Dhaka, Bangladesh "all in their late teens or early 20s, were products of Bangladesh’s elite, several having attended one of the country’s top English-medium private schools as well as universities both in the country and abroad.

Among them was the son of a former city leader in the prime minister’s own Awami League, the governing party.

“That’s what we’re absolutely riveted by,” said Kazi Anis Ahmed, a writer and publisher of the daily newspaper The Dhaka Tribune. “That these kids from very affluent families with no material want can still be turned to this kind of ideology, motivated not just to the point of killing but also want to be killed.”

That children of the country’s upper classes appear to have joined militant Islamists in an act of such brutality highlighted the radicalization among the largely moderate Muslim population here, a process that has accelerated in recent years."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/wo...=top-news&_r=0

TM

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy (Post 501615)

For me, the challenge is always to try to understand the causes of terrorism in Islamic countries as being as complex as the causes of native terrorism here in the US. Islam is clearly an important tool for terrorists, both ideologically and practically (the fact that it's easy to get everyone together once a year in Mecca, for example, has always helped internationalize what otherwise might be local movements). Are these folks like the Brandeis weatherman in the 60s, who killed to fuel a fairly romantic notion of themselves as leaders of the masses? Are they crazies who found each other? Did they react against the western education they received, perhaps getting too heavy a dose of anti-Islamic balderdash from their teachers or the media?

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall (Post 501616)

I'm fairly certain the many reasons why anyone (rich, poor, educated, ignorant, etc.) takes to terrorism are complex. We are (and maybe I more than I should am) constantly trying to reduce it to something fairly easy to understand.

There seems to be a true hatred for the West (which cannot be distilled into any one reason) and for Muslims who are looked upon as not true to Islam. Why people take to violence when it comes to the former, I feel like I understand, given all of the violence that comes from the West. The latter I do not understand at all (outside of extremists who are easily dismissed). But the idea that people should be put to death if they are against Islam (or worse, are seen as not fully committed) is something I cannot wrap my brain around.

That said, I don't understand why Indians hate Pakistanis, Hutus hate Tutsis, North Koreans hate South Koreans, Serbs hate Croats, etc.

The world is shit.

TM

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski (Post 501605)

So, I didn't really listen in macroeconomics. When someone says the economy really did well under President ____, what is the implication? Is it spending to stimulate jobs/ cash flowing, or cutting back to fight down inflation? Or is the economy really not under anyone's real control?

What does a president really do?

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall (Post 501616)

I'm fairly certain the many reasons why anyone (rich, poor, educated, ignorant, etc.) takes to terrorism are complex. We are (and maybe I more than I should am) constantly trying to reduce it to something fairly easy to understand.

There seems to be a true hatred for the West (which cannot be distilled into any one reason) and for Muslims who are looked upon as not true to Islam. Why people take to violence when it comes to the former, I feel like I understand, given all of the violence that comes from the West. The latter I do not understand at all (outside of extremists who are easily dismissed). But the idea that people should be put to death if they are against Islam (or worse, are seen as not fully committed) is something I cannot wrap my brain around.

That said, I don't understand why Indians hate Pakistanis, Hutus hate Tutsis, North Koreans hate South Koreans, Serbs hate Croats, etc.

The world is shit.

TM