I’ll try to finish all the clips today. Here is the second batch and I went back to Krugman/Smith05 and unlocked it, sorry. That clip is also included here in case you don’t want to go back to the previous post to view it.
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Web design and digital marketing San Francisco
Web design and digital marketing San Francisco
Economics 101:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiE1VgWdcQM
Thanks…these are interesting. When there is too much space between the customer and provider, things get exploited and abused…by both parties.
Transcripts please!
“… the level of discourse has dropped sharply …” apparently due to the rise of info-babes on TV, and by association, the fact that anyone can pose as an expert on the internet. So what’s next – regulation of who is qualified to comment on economics?
It’s interesting how Krugman is blaming Wall Street/bankers/financiers and their greed for the housing crisis BUT does not mention that Washington started the mess with their advocation of everyone (regardless of their ability to pay) owning a home. This little problem started back during the Clinton administration. Did greed play a part? Yes. But it is greed made legitimate by Washington edict.
Facts would be nice, not personal opinion – as Krugman loves to do as seen in the clip titled “Obama’s so-so plan to reform the U.S. financial system” around 1:00 minute into the clip to 1:20.
Actually, he does talk about it how Washington was involved but he doesn’t mention Clinton rather he goes back further to Reagan and the deregulation of the financial industry as a whole. To paraphrase he claimed: that the removal of collateral obligations got the ball rolling; essentially the advocation of loans for everyone without regard to the ability of the borrower to pay. Yes Clinton made it worse but it was Reagan/1980-1982 Congress that started the ball rolling.
“O’Neill said he tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits-expected to top $500 billion this fiscal year alone-posed a threat to the economy. Cheney cut him off. “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said, according to excerpts. Cheney continued: “We won the midterms (congressional elections). This is our due.” A month later, Cheney told the Treasury secretary he was fired. ”
Dick and I agree….. Reagan
My Conservative friends all agree now that it wasn’t Clinton’s fault it was actually Carter’s.
My Liberal friends all agree now that it wasn’t Bush’s fault it was Reagan’s.
My Conservative friends have concluded definitively now that it was in fact LBJ and the whole thing was a result of the 60s, the worst decade ever.
My Liberal friends have re-examined the evidence and trace it back to Nixon’s monetary policies going all the way back to Eisenhower.
My Conservative friends. . .
Finally, someone with real eco-political insight! Now perhaps we can get back to technology.
All my friends agree that both sides have been encouraging lending for decades, and that there really isn’t any difference between the two.
The book “Global Senior Holocaust” is being written…. like the ballast of a ship in the sea of deficit exponentiation, listing 30 deg to the port not the starboard. A snuffiing out ot what challenges actuarial math. The insurance industry lives on policy lapses, and hates viaticals! What a bargain! Sheesh!
Come on. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Everyone agreed that home-owning correlated with all sorts of good stuff and that many people were arbitrarily being shut out of home ownership. Given that, the very small amounts of money the Feds spent to promote home ownership seemed a good idea. This has been Federal policy forever. It has been embraced, more or less, by everyone.
My friend John used to say that given a tiny loophole designed to deal with one minor issue…Wall Street could pull a dinosaur through it. That’s what happened.
It could only have been stopped if folk from all sides agreed it was a bad idea. But the right didn’t want to stifle economic growth or supervise business and the left didn’t want to see poor people unable to live decently. If a decent sized group of smart people with loud megaphones has been yelling “stop, stop” it might have helped, but there was no organized third-party opposition. So it happened.
Draw a lesson: against stupidity the gods themselves labor it vain. It will happen again just as soon as we forget what just happened. So it goes.
BTW: I hate, Hate HATE video clips. The information density is much too low. Provide transcripts. Please?
Actually the whole “home owning is a Good Thing” meme is distinctly anglophone. Most of Europe, and much of the rest of the world, is quite happy to rent. But in the US, UK, and Australia there are huge tax incentives for buying (probably because politicians who create them are more likely to win elections).
Has this guy every seen a regulation or new agency that he didn’t like? It’s disturbing how so many otherwise smart people rationalize their biases for such things. Basically they really don’t like how free markets don’t behave in the manner that they predicted. They only get to see the data and have little impact on being able to affect the data. With more regulations and agencies they can fine tune it – at least long enough so that they feel they’ve made a difference.
Sadly they ignore the fundamental truth: government has never created wealth, it can only destroy wealth.
He’s upset about financial deregulation allowing such high percentages of mortgages. Well why did so many people go nuts over buying homes and driving up their prices in the first place? The answer is that it is the ONLY legitimate tax deduction left available to the typical American family + Barney Frank made sure that Fannie Mae made loans available to completely unqualified individuals who could never pay them back. So what do you do if you’re a legitimate mortgage company having to compete with that? You either go along and hope for the best or you leave the business. The Banks that remain strong today left.
The power to tax is the power to destroy is the power to control. Income taxes on middle class families have not been indexed with inflation which caused a near universal requirement for a two-career family just to keep up. Well, since polygamy and child labor are not legal in most states, the cost of government finally caught up with us and we’re paying the price.
Get the government out of the economy and there won’t be such opportunities to game the system. All these Wall Street parlour games (greed) are simply a result of an industry fighting back against a fixed game and trying to fix it to their benefit – symptomatic not the cause. Remove the cheats and it levels the playing field for us all. It’s very simple. Doesn’t mean it’s easy but it must be done or America will ultimately go into default. Obama’s plan can go no other direction if pursued.
Wonder what Krugmann thinks about Sarbanes-Oxley? Biggest single source of wealth destruction since the income tax and clearly did NOT achieve it’s stated purpose. Why is it still around? Get real.
“Wonder what Krugmann thinks about Sarbanes-Oxley?”
This might be a clue: https://www.pkarchive.org/column/100802.html
“Get the government out of the economy and there won’t be such opportunities to game the system. All these Wall Street parlour games (greed) are simply a result of an industry fighting back against a fixed game and trying to fix it to their benefit – symptomatic not the cause. Remove the cheats and it levels the playing field for us all.”
Deregulation is all about removing the referee (aka regulatory agencies) so as to make easier to fleece the marks. Not that the referees always have clean hands, but the folks demanding deregulation are generally on the side of the cheats.
from poorandstupid.com
Daniel Okrent, while ombudsman for the New York Times, wrote that “Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers.” Indeed. But Krugman’s distortions were so rampant, and his unwillingness to correct them so intransigent, that Okrent — no doubt pressured into service by my Krugman Truth Squad column for NRO — did something about it. Okrent forced the Times op-ed page to adopt for the first time a corrections policy for op-ed columnists. That was in 2004. Later, when Krugman flouted that policy, the Krugman Truth Squad went to work on Okrent’s successor, Byron Calame, who pressed for the adoption of a new, more stringent policy in 2005.
Poorandstupid.com – that would be the website of Don Luskin:
“The editors of The Yale Book of Quotations also made note of the inopportune timing of Luskin’s editorial and included his prediction in their list of Top ten quotes of 2008. He has been singled out for “some of the worst, money losing commentary of the past few years.”
He has been frequently referred to by Brad DeLong as “the Stupidest Man Alive” for, amongst other things, his continued support for literal interpretations of the Laffer Curve.”
-from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Luskin#Predictions
Robert, Please don’t get me wrong, but I think you were generating much more focused content when you were employed with PBS. Your readers really value your deep insights into technology – I know I do. I realize that insightful thinking in tech (as with any other field) cannot be treated in isolation, but I still believe, as keen follower of your posts, that you give me and your other readers more in the way of technology related posts and less (much much less) of the generic stuff. Regards – bw
i stopped watching at the “stupid or evil” bit. and that is supposed to be an “expert”? anyone coming up with such silly nonsense loses any authority. i just wasted 15 minutes of my life listening to political bias.
On the contrary, “stupid or evil” is a concise and accurate summary of the Bush administration.
if you think otherwise, you probably haven’t been paying sufficiently close attention.
If that’s true, I’d rather be stupid or evil than have the mental disease of liberalism.
Since you put it that way, I have the utmost confidence that you will be able to avoid the dreadful disease.
it is clear that you probably won’t understand a proper explanation of the real reasons of the crisis, and that blaming greedy bankers or stupid presidents, for many reasons, suits you better. however the reality is different, my friend. my point was anyway another: stupid/evil is not an economic analysis, is just a personal opinion, and a very poor one at that. anyone coming up with such nonsense loses any respect or will to listen that i could have. by the way, you are stupid too, and evil, or both. do i sound like an expert in macroeconomics now, or do i just sound like an idiot?
“by the way, you are stupid too, and evil, or both. do i sound like an expert in macroeconomics now, or do i just sound like an idiot?”
The latter.
Blaming greedy bankers for being greedy seems rather, ah, stupid; what I want to know is where were the federal regulators who were supposed to keep the greedy bankers honest and reign in their worst excesses?
Oh that’s right, they were posing in three-piece suits holding gardening tools and slapping themselves on the back for the good job they were doing deregulating the financial sector.
see http://dorkmonger.blogspot.com/2008/11/cutting-red-tape.html
google for community reinvestment act, you will find interesting things.
greedy bankers is BS. doh, bankers are greedy by definition. same as corporations, enterprise etc. they are out to make money. i suppose you are a US citizen. well i have bad news for you. while you were distracted blaming “greedy bankers” they have turned your country in a socialist state. and the man currently in office is pushing full throttle on this process. you better brace for impact, because you havent seen nothing yet. this crisis is merely the result of a failed social engineering experiment, houses for everybody. wait till the results of the other failing social engineering experiment, high costs of energy, will hit. THAT will hurt really bad. this one is just small change, compared.
Paul Krugman is right, greed springs eternal.
However the greedy guzzlers in this story swindled the taxpayers with the aid of the Bush administration. As Adam Smith said they should give the money back. I’m amazed our government is willing to be plundered by such a reckless, evil group. Nobody’s minding the store.
Thanks Bob for depressing me more with these videos.
“greed springs eternal” on the part of those who are productive as well as those who tax the productive.
It’s more than greed. I think much of the population has been tricked into voting against their own interests by “hot button” political discourse and magical thinking along the lines of a post I read on Salon or Slate: A woman wrote, “My husband is a (I can’t exactly remember) a hourly wage worker and hopes to be rich someday. So he votes Republican because he is scared about the government taxing his fortune away.”
Sure, someone might argue that such hope is admirable–American Dream and all that. But the overwhelming probability is that he will never make it to that kind of wealth. Meanwhile, people with that kind of wealth have found a way to appeal to his greed even before he has anything. They get the support of these poor folks even while sucker punching them with all their might, laying them off at the first opportunity, etc.
I myself am a business owner and as I interact with other business owners I find this same idiocy, office or car radio tuned in to Rush or Hannity or whomever.
“office or car radio tuned in to Rush or Hannity or whomever”
Just because we’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out ot get us. It seems the conservatives are the only ones paying attention to history. Businessmen and investors use their own money while the government steals yours. We need government to protect our freedoms not to take them away.
Thanks for posting these Bob. Maybe I’m not as enlightened as some other readers but I am enjoying the content and hope to see the rest of them soon.
Please publish the rest of these.
Also, yesterday, August 23, the following interesting related article appeared in The London Times Online:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article6806419.ece