Don't forget through all of that madness Moody's was rating utter crap as AAA
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_t...
CDO-squared (CDOs of CDOs) were a problem. If you took those 60 dog-shit loans, mixed them together, and created 10 high quality loans out of them, problems began to occur.
Even then, it wasn't the CDO-squared that collapsed the whole thing. It was the CDS: the "insurance" (so to speak) on the CDO-squared that made things go haywire.
Go through enough layers and you eventually hit an insurer that has zero chance of being able to cover all of the losses of everyone. It could be CDS of CDOs of CDOs, or coins being backed by other coins.
Thankfully the average person is less affected by crypto losses than mortgages, or in the case of the depression, stocks.
The number of big-name banks whose actions are questionable [1] - if not actually criminal - is astonishing.
[1] As reported by insider papers like the Financial Times.
I remember a guy bragging about helping another firm backdate its books to get bail out money. He was bragging. Still remember his name and how he got his pill head daughter a Cush company paid job in London.
The truly pernicious part is the self-financing spiral. Banks issued mortgages, which deposit cash in the home seller's account. Seller puts the cash into a money market fund. MMF gets short-term interest by financing AAA-rated securities. EU banks use this financing to buy senior tranches of MBSes. These MBS purchases allow banks to issue more mortgages by freeing up their capitalization.
Like, zero-sum alchemy will only generate small frauds and relatively limited losses. You need large amounts of leverage and some kind of self-financing spiral to generate catastrophic de-leveraging events.
In hindsight, it should have been structured like government insurance servicers: subject to random and regular audits, with $$$ fines if they turn up anything fishy.
If you don't want corruption, engineer a system where not being corrupt is more profitable...
https://www.cnbc.com/id/25195425
It's amazing how the government somehow managed to successfully pin all the blame on corporations for problems it helped cause. From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis
"Lenders made loans that they knew borrowers could not afford and that could cause massive losses to investors in mortgage securities."
Of course, it was the government itself that pressured banks to make these loans in the first place. From https://www.appeal-democrat.com/thomas-sowell-government-cre...
"All this was an opening salvo in a campaign to get Congress to pass laws forcing lenders to lend to people they would not otherwise lend to and in places where they would not otherwise put their money."
Financial firms has been making tons of money during decades of increasing wealth inequality. Sure, let's talk about these congressional acts, but not going to put a lot of blame on relatively small programs that required these firms to throw back some scraps.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/financial...
"The seeds of the financial crisis were planted during years of rock-bottom interest rates and loose lending standards that fueled a housing price bubble in the U.S. and elsewhere.
It began, as usual, with good intentions. Faced with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, a series of corporate accounting scandals, and the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate from 6.5% in May 2000 to 1% in June 2003. 4 5 The aim was to boost the economy by making money available to businesses and consumers at bargain rates. e result was an upward spiral in home prices as borrowers took advantage of the low mortgage rates. 6
Even subprime borrowers, those with poor or no credit history, were able to realize the dream of buying a home. "
The repeated story of our government's behavior in the financial sector is:
1) act with supposedly good intentions
2) Mess everything up
3) Blame the mess on someone else and call for more government action to clean things up.
You should read "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics." It really is illuminating to learn at an academic level how wealth has been produced throughout history and some reasons why it is distributed unevenly.
https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Politics-Thomas-Sowell...
a: all property that has a money value or an exchangeable value
b: all material objects that have economic utility
I'm not sure what' you're talking about with regards to "ensuring" or "guarding" it. But in general, wealth is produced in various forms by people. That's generally the goal of work! Just as important, wealth decays over time. And, like with everything else in this universe, everything related to the production and maintenance of wealth is unevenly distributed, including:
1) Physical resources
2) knowledge and skills
3) cultural and moral values
4) geopolitical landscape
5) personality and personal productive capacity
6) social circumstances
7) dumb luck
Given that none of this is evenly distributed between individuals, groups, nations, etc., it's absurd to expect wealth to be evenly distributed, even in a hypothetically just world. In fact, based on what we know, we should expect differential wealth to be a simple and indisputable fact of life.
In a functioning economy, people earn money by creating value for others. This generally means that even as the rich get richer, so do the poor. It is hardly disputable that capitalism has done more to lift more people out of poverty than any other economic system. Also, because wealth decays, to maintain wealth one must invest it to produce more of it. It is through this investment that society can benefit as a whole.
The problems with wealth redistribution include:
1) By taking wealth from people who know generally able to best produce it, you reduce their ability to invest wealth to produce more of it. All of society suffers for this as overall wealth decreases for everyone.
2) When giving wealth to people who aren't producing anything, they take the wealth and spend it without creating any more wealth. Overall wealth decreases for everyone. It is hardly disputable that welfare programs in Western countries have led to far more dependence and far more able-bodied people not working than before these programs existed.
It is not an accident that wealth redistribution makes countries poorer, ultimately harming the poor that the redistribution is meant to help. We should be focusing less on wealth equity and more on wealth production and maintenance.
https://www.northwood.edu/afeu/when-free-to-choose/how-to-en...
One of the preconditions of the level of prosperity we experience today is government stability and essentially British or Western European laws and cultural and Christian values. As those things erode, prosperity decreases. And, there is a great threat of worldwide prosperity taking a nosedive on many fronts, including the global ESG movement, WEF great reset, socialist/communist/fascist/authoritarian government movements, etc. We are very fortunate to have experienced the overall wealth that we do today, and, unfortunately, it's probably only going to get worse from here the way things are going.
And the government didn’t force banks to buy loans from originators who were known to fake documents, and then give them 120 LTV loans.
The public has been treating their Senators and Representatives like celebrities.
Electoral turnovers flush corruption; we really need to stop being ruled by pudding brains with no skin in the future game who LARP concern while doing nothing but living easy: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766
I’ve been beating this drum for more than 10 years. The big story of the financial crisis is that while there was fraud and corruption at the margins, the bulk of the economic dislocation was caused by well intentioned people making good faith decisions that in hindsight proved very foolish. People who had no business buying a home or taking out that loan were. Banks were making the loans not just because there was a global capital glut chasing returns, the credit tranching structures were working, and the ever rising house prices hid any risk. No one in the industry had seen house prices broadly go down in generations. In retrospect there were a number of systemic issues that now seem obvious, but having been there it wasn’t that obvious at the time.
I agree with that. But that comes about because we've arranged our economic activity into monolithic 'corporations' that are immortal, have the legal status of persons, and are compelled to chase shortsighted profit above all else, show no remorse, and any moral wrongdoing is just a slight financial risk to be approached like any other monetary risk.
All the humans working for the oil industry today are making good faith decisions but together they work for a massive unstoppable inhuman juggernaut that is destroying our climate while fighting every attempt to rein it in with every means possible at its disposal.
And yes I can call corporations greedy. They have demanded to be treated as people in the courts of law so I'll judge them as people
Capitalism is great, but it only works when founded on a strong moral framework. Christianity served that purpose for the history of capitalism. However, once you abandon or corrupt your morality, then you'll see the majority of corporations do evil things, no matter whether they claim to only care about profits, or whether they claim that they also want to save the environment and bring about equity, inclusivity, or whatever Marxist Utopian ideal is in vogue at the moment.