It's offical. The protestors are getting stupider.

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retyopy

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Danny Ocean said:
retyopy said:
Wait a minute... I just realized... Everyone on this thread are fucking idiots. Seriously.

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, There was good vs. evil. And then they both exploded. Their blood mixed together, and from that day forth, no one could be fully good or fully evil.

Bottom line: THINGS ARE NEVER IN BLACK AND WHITE. there will always be shades of grey. ALWAYS.
This just in: homosexuals are gay, the sky is blue, gifts are free, bonuses are added, summaries are short, hot drinks are hot, and most ideas cannot be adequately simplified into a boolian face-oooff!!

Captain Obvious strikes again!


Seriously, if you're just going to wade in here to tell everyone else they're stupid you can skip on replying to this.
Yeah, sorry, I was being a bit of an ass, but half the commentors seem to think this os really good vs. evil, no matter what side they're on. I was pissed. Not a good exscuse, but hey, it's what I have.
 

Danny Ocean

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retyopy said:
Yeah, sorry, I was being a bit of an ass, but half the commentors seem to think this os really good vs. evil, no matter what side they're on. I was pissed. Not a good exscuse, but hey, it's what I have.
I can see what you mean. I think it's worse for me because I actually know a bit about economics. Someone once said 'The curse of knowledge is eternal exasperation.' About right in these times of popular politics and economics.

Still, if I was you, I'd fix that post before it gets you a suspension.
 

DRTJR

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the most resent downturn was caused in part by the sub-prime bubble because of the "Affordable housing" initiative. Are banks to blame? it part yes, but these protest neglect the other contributors. America has a "Mixed" economy, meaning a fusion of parts of Market and Command economies. We are Far more Market than command, and should gravitate further towards a more of a market economy, but that's my opinion.
 

retyopy

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Danny Ocean said:
retyopy said:
Yeah, sorry, I was being a bit of an ass, but half the commentors seem to think this os really good vs. evil, no matter what side they're on. I was pissed. Not a good exscuse, but hey, it's what I have.
I can see what you mean. I think it's worse for me because I actually know a bit about economics. Someone once said 'The curse of knowledge is eternal exasperation.' About right in these times of popular politics and economics.
I get exasperated all the time, and I'm an idiot. I got the short end of the stick both times.
 

Jegsimmons

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Rule Britannia said:
The whole occupy wall street is the dumbest shit.
"That guy has more money than me, it's not fair!" well he kinda worked for it.
"They are the ones that ruined the economy" well not really they may have started it but everybody contributed to it.
pretty much this, also, didnt this recession start because people tried to by houses they couldnt afford and take out bank loans they couldn't pay back.....or something like that?
so its kind of the people the protesters are "marching for"'s fault?
 

-|-

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Capitalism = good. Stealing = bad.

When the banks borrow at practically 0% from the government and lend back to the same government at a higher rate that is stealing your money. When the banks say this mortgage security is good when they know it's a lie, they are stealing from the person they sell it too. When the banks get bailed out using your money it is stealing from you. When the bank lends money and the risk is underwritten by tax-payers - that is stealing your money. When the central bank devalues the currency by printing it - it is stealing your money.
 

Danny Ocean

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Jegsimmons said:
didnt this recession start because people tried to by houses they couldnt afford and take out bank loans they couldn't pay back.....or something like that?
so its kind of the people the protesters are "marching for"'s fault?
It's more the fault of the banks for lending to them, because the people are in a position of understandable ignorance in comparison to those offering them the money.

However, it is still indeed partly the fault of the borrowers. It's also partly the fault of the government. It's partly (I would say the largest minority) the fault of the banks, but then they were operating in a financial system where risk wasn't adequately assigned among so many other structural flaws.

If you don't mind some jargon, go to a library and find this:

Fault Lines- How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Econonmy [http://www.amazon.com/Fault-Lines-Fractures-Threaten-Economy/dp/0691146837] by Raghuram G. Rajan.

Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it's tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. In Fault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren't fixed.

Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown--made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners--were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose. He traces the deepening fault lines in a world overly dependent on the indebted American consumer to power global economic growth and stave off global downturns. He exposes a system where America's growing inequality and thin social safety net create tremendous political pressure to encourage easy credit and keep job creation robust, no matter what the consequences to the economy's long-term health; and where the U.S. financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an overstimulated America and an underconsuming world.

In Fault Lines, Rajan demonstrates how unequal access to education and health care in the United States puts us all in deeper financial peril, even as the economic choices of countries like Germany, Japan, and China place an undue burden on America to get its policies right. He outlines the hard choices we need to make to ensure a more stable world economy and restore lasting prosperity.
 

OrokuSaki

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Rule Britannia said:
The whole occupy wall street is the dumbest shit.
"That guy has more money than me, it's not fair!" well he kinda worked for it.
"They are the ones that ruined the economy" well not really they may have started it but everybody contributed to it.
No, he did not necessarily work for it. It's possible that his Great Great Grandfather worked for it and the current billionaire is just a dick. Should we really reward stuck up prats like Paris Hilton for hitting the genetic lottery? I think not.
 

Danny Ocean

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OrokuSaki said:
No, he did not necessarily work for it.
Or, more often, his pay is viewed as disproportionate to the work he does put in. It cannot be the case that the CEO of a company is working 700x harder than his average employee, as the difference in wages would suggest.
 

-|-

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Jegsimmons said:
didnt this recession start because people tried to by houses they couldnt afford and take out bank loans they couldn't pay back.....or something like that?
so its kind of the people the protesters are "marching for"'s fault?
If you borrow money you can't afford to pay you should go bankrupt.
If your business is lending money and you don't do your due diligence and lend money to people who can't pay it back then you should go out of business. You should not get free money from the government.

Why should one group of people get free government money and another get turfed out onto the street? That is the root of peoples anger - and they are right to be pissed.
 

OrokuSaki

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Danny Ocean said:
OrokuSaki said:
No, he did not necessarily work for it.
Or, more often, his pay is viewed as disproportionate to the work he does put in. It cannot be the case that the CEO of a company is working 700x harder than his average employee, as the difference in wages would suggest.
That too, I've always wondered why secretaries could get paid more than manual laborers. There just seems to be an inconsistency there between pay and amount of work done.
 

4173

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Jegsimmons said:
Rule Britannia said:
The whole occupy wall street is the dumbest shit.
"That guy has more money than me, it's not fair!" well he kinda worked for it.
"They are the ones that ruined the economy" well not really they may have started it but everybody contributed to it.
pretty much this, also, didnt this recession start because people tried to by houses they couldnt afford and take out bank loans they couldn't pay back.....or something like that?
so its kind of the people the protesters are "marching for"'s fault?
Someone will probably come and elaborate/correct me, but partly. The banks essentially turned those high-risk loans into a subsection of the stock market. When the mortgages failed, some extremely large companies had massively over exposed themselves betting on the loans. Once some companies failed, some one flinched and then someone else flinched in response in a cascade of uncertainty.




The most interesting part of OWS to me, something I'm genuinely curious about. Just how much of a taxation increase on the 1% would be necessary to wipe out in national debt in a reasonable amount of time? Is it even possible? One gets the feeling that a lot of OWS, no matter how many concessions they got, go batshit crazy if any government spending cuts are proposed.
 

daubie

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Kopikatsu said:
Zachary Amaranth said:
Your summary of the trigger of the great depression is quite glib, but if it helps you spin your narrative, I say embrace it. LOL PROTESTERS!
Alright, I'll go a bit more indepth.

The Great Depression first 'started' when the stock market started to tank. Because value was going down so quickly, everyone started selling off their shares. Since everyone was selling their stock but nobody was really buying, it caused the stock market to crash so rapidly that banks were forced to shut down because, in addition to giving people loans (Who then used that to invest in the stock market), they also invested in the stock market themselves.

With news that some banks were falling, a great number of people pulled their money out of banks at the same time. Because the banks didn't actually HAVE that money to give out (Because it was loaned out to other people), those banks were forced to close as well.

Companies and businesses that failed to pull out of the banks fast enough lost all of their money when the bank closed. So it became a race against time to pull out all of your money, which caused the banks to fail even faster.

It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. People took their money out of the bank because they were afraid it would fail, which caused them to fail...

Anyway, the banks going down caused many businesses to go bankrupt which meant many people lost their jobs. Prices started to inflate, but noone was making enough money to pay the higher prices. So more people lost their jobs because the business couldn't afford to keep them on because nobody was buying their products, but noone was buying their products because nobody had any money.

And so the cycle continued until the global economy crashed. Fun story, no?

Edit: So while the trigger of the Great Depression was the crash of the stock market, by doing a wide-scale bank run, they're skipping that step and going straight to 'crash the banks'. Which is what actually caused the GD.
Another large part of the crash in 1929 was because banks were selling stocks on credit. People only actually paid 10-20% of the price of the stocks, so the banks were getting drained by shifty wall street members.

There were all sorts of reasons for the crash. You didn't make your argument more thorough, you made it more long winded. Not that I don't agree that the protesters need to approach the occupation from a more cohesive angle, but if you want a truly convincing argument it needs to be a complete one. Also, "noone" is two words.
 

Aglynugga

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Hey...wait. Isn't closing your bank account legal? I mean, aren't you allowed to withdraw money or close your account at your discretion? Well, ok, as long as the bank is open? It doesn't really matter how many people decided to withdraw money, it's their legal right to do so. It's, you know, the American Way.
And why should banks get away with not having a large enough physical stock of money to handle mass withdrawls? I mean, no matter what amazing work of financial fiction is occuring, isn't every electronic dollar in someone's account supposed to be physically represented by an actual dollar as well? I mean, I'm not an economist, but isn't that how it works? You can't just make up electronic cash, can you?
 

neurohazzard

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Don't know if this has been said yet, and forgive me playing devils advocate for a sec, but sometimes you have to dismantle a system completely in order to replace it something better. Crashing the economy may be necessary temporarily, so that a system can be put in place that makes more sense for the modern world. But the thing our economic system wants you to think above all else is that you can't live without it, and that there is no alternative. Addiction via a mnemenic virus, devious isn't it ;)
 

Danny Ocean

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neurohazzard said:
DAddiction via a mnemenic virus, devious isn't it ;)
1984 envisioned a society where the people were controlled through the application of fear and violence.

Brave New World envisioned a society where the people were controlled through the application of information and pleasure.

1984; stick.

Brave New World; carrot.

Guess which one you're living in?

Hint: It's not 1984. That's just misinformation.
 

Jegsimmons

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4173 said:
Jegsimmons said:
Rule Britannia said:
The whole occupy wall street is the dumbest shit.
"That guy has more money than me, it's not fair!" well he kinda worked for it.
"They are the ones that ruined the economy" well not really they may have started it but everybody contributed to it.
pretty much this, also, didnt this recession start because people tried to by houses they couldnt afford and take out bank loans they couldn't pay back.....or something like that?
so its kind of the people the protesters are "marching for"'s fault?
Someone will probably come and elaborate/correct me, but partly. The banks essentially turned those high-risk loans into a subsection of the stock market. When the mortgages failed, some extremely large companies had massively over exposed themselves betting on the loans. Once some companies failed, some one flinched and then someone else flinched in response in a cascade of uncertainty.




The most interesting part of OWS to me, something I'm genuinely curious about. Just how much of a taxation increase on the 1% would be necessary to wipe out in national debt in a reasonable amount of time? Is it even possible? One gets the feeling that a lot of OWS, no matter how many concessions they got, go batshit crazy if any government spending cuts are proposed.
i think they said something that even if they taxed the rich as hard as possible while keeping them in the rich category, it would take something like 20-40 years to get rid of the debt because the nation takes in like 1-2 trillion a year and we have to keep ourselves running. I THINK im not sure about that at all. which tells me, we spend too much damn money on government programs that dont create jobs. Because the government has a problem figuring out the difference between putting money in the economy and circulating money through the economy.
and that producing money is making the debt worse because half the value of money is it's rarity. after all, if only 10 thousand dollars existed in the US, that could buy half the nation.
 

Jegsimmons

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Aglynugga said:
Hey...wait. Isn't closing your bank account legal? I mean, aren't you allowed to withdraw money or close your account at your discretion? Well, ok, as long as the bank is open? It doesn't really matter how many people decided to withdraw money, it's their legal right to do so. It's, you know, the American Way.
And why should banks get away with not having a large enough physical stock of money to handle mass withdrawls? I mean, no matter what amazing work of financial fiction is occuring, isn't every electronic dollar in someone's account supposed to be physically represented by an actual dollar as well? I mean, I'm not an economist, but isn't that how it works? You can't just make up electronic cash, can you?
because banks dont work that way. simply put. its too expensive and banks get money via loans.
 

Raven_Operative

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Danny Ocean said:
'The curse of knowledge is eternal exasperation.'
That line just made my day.

OT: I doubt this will work out for the protesters. I really have no knowledge about this, but something tells me the banks will do something to prevent this from happening,. Maybe freeze some accounts or borrow some extra cash?