[parks61]

ratman
i've heard a couple of insiders say essentially the same thing. i just hope it's really not "everyone" in a huge way.
-parks
ps. no homeowners walked away (from their foreclosed houses) with severence packages.... a lot of insiders made really slimey deals and were paid hansomely to walk away from their jobs when the shit hit the fan in a bad way.

 

[KeninIowa]

Is this what you mean JohnnyB?

http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?docid=ddp4zq7n_0cdjsr4fn&skipauth=true&pli=1

Funny if it wasn't fairly accurate. A few years ago I was helping my GF at the time shop for a mortgage. The BS and bad information I got from mortgage companies was actually scary. The one guy and I got into it over the phone when I told him how wrong and irresponsible I thought his spiel was. Wish I could find him today and ask him if he needs a place to rent.

There are sectors of the economy and areas of the country that are good. Right now ag stuff is awesome around me. There's a lot of repo'd houses(by Iowa standards), but investors fighting over them. The thing I see is that home foreclosures, to a point, don't effect housing prices as much as the media would like you to beleive. A repo is typically snatched up by an investor. Most banks won't loan on a repo to an average homeowner, so they don't drive down the price of owner-occuppied houses as fast as you think it would.

Remember in a general macroeconomic sense wealth is ever really lost just redistributed. There are a lot of people that have made and are still making boatloads of money extending credit to people that shouldn't have it.

 

[bcr]

I'm in on this thread late but I gotta vent:

fuct up. The thieving, bottom feeding maggots gamed the system one more time. slice and dice the mortgage securities so fine that no one knows where the bad ones are. excellent idea. You know you have a good pyramid scheme working when the fed has to rush in to cauterize the hemorrhage with whatever billions and cross their fingers there isn't a run on the next wall street icon. Its really great when the accountability let the market decide personal responsibility police are tripping over themselves in there haste to cash out 'cept I can't really savor it because I have a feeling we'll be paying for this one for a while. cheers or not, bcr

 

[OC Steve]

The way I see it, our country is running a huge experiment. We are trying to find out if a democracy can function for very long without being taken over and controlled by the power of capital. In other words, we are trying to see which is stronger: the power of individuals to vote in their best interest, or the power of capital to corrupt and control the democratic process.

We have been running this experiment for a couple of hundred years now, and the results are becoming pretty clear. The average American citizen has been fleeced time after time by the forces of capitalism. Just within my lifetime, we have had a series of pointless wars that served mainly to enrich corporate interests, a savings and loan crisis that costs us billions, and now we have a war in Iraq that is estimated to cost us three trillion dollars by the time it's over. We have an electoral process that is deeply corrupted by the influence of financial contributors and lobbyists. Corporate interests have distorted our government policies so much that many business risks are now borne by taxpayers, while more and more businesses are profiting from irresponsible tax breaks and from government outsourcing (Halliburton, etc.). The rich keep getting richer, and the average guy struggles to make ends meet.

The current mortgage crisis is just one more example of the failure of our government to protect the interests of the average American. Your tax dollars will by spent to bail out the big mortgage lenders. When are we going to take our government back, and make it work for us, instead of the wealthy?

 

[rat]

Impossible.

Capitalism doesn't work without class. No uber-rich... no ultra-poor...no capitalism.

true democracy can't exist... simply because greed makes it impossible. It would result in total chaos as everyone voted for whetever gave them the best personal result.

 

[Diamondj]

One thing that brings home the real lack of "debt management" by the general public is the number of people I see using their credit cards... to buy LUNCH! And I'm not talking nice restaurant lunch, I'm talking fucking McDonalds! Yeah I know probably half the plastic I see flashing is debit cards, but I see plenty of Amex, Visa, and MC getting whipped out to pay for an under $10 lunch. WTF? You don't have the price of a McCrappy meal in your pocket, you might need to re-evaluate your debt management strategy.....

 

[ROSKO]

VOTE Total Chaos in 2008!

 

[cseger1]

quote:Originally posted by UngaWunga

If you want some for yourself, become a ceo.

Ha ha. Actually I am a ceo. My wife and I run a small herd of goats and a cheese company. Last year we went S-corp and we became officers. She's the president. Our sales will be less than 50K so I don't see myself getting out with the Stan O'Neil treatment.