The Gaming Den

tzor wrote:Yes indeed the guy who thought Obama was a "moderate." What a laugh. You wrap up convenient lies and call them inconvenient truths.

Obama is a moderate. A moderate Republican. From working with the GOP to keep the tax cuts, not ending either of the wars or closing gitmo to the healthcare plan that forces people to buy insurance. Admit it Tzor, if he wasn't black and wasn't a 'Democrat' the GOP would hold him in higher regards than either Bush.

tzor wrote:I still need a little more context, as in when I actually said this. Was this before or after the problem of PIGS in Europe (which is only tangentially related to the US Crisis). There was clearly no crisis in China, although there may be one in a few years unrelated to the problems in 2008.

So... you are claiming the world economic crisis, is actually completely separate in nature? The US had nothing to do with triggering it. Even though the larger bulk of the triggering bad debt owned by banks, governments and other bodies world wide is repackaged fraudulent US debt.

Sorry. That makes you a tinfoil crazy the like of which is laughed out of serious discussions on the matter.

This current crisis was extended and enlarged by Democratic stimilus and Obama Care.

Your claims and arguments about the "non crisis" came at a time shortly before the BUSH bailouts. And your argument and YOU vanished in fucking SHAME the moment he started actually performing those bailouts.

Edit: Frank was kind enough to actually give a link ... the post was dated 11 Sep 2008. It would be another year before the first of the PIGS of Europe, Greece, would start to fall.

So... are you arguing that I was in fact SO right that I WASN'T as I claim merely observing a crisis unfolding in the present but was in fact ACCURATELY PREDICTING a crisis in the future?

I mean what's the angle here "HAH! You weren't as right as you said, you were MORE RIGHT, which makes you wrong AHAHAHAHAH!"

At that time, yes, BEFORE things had totally openly gone to shit in a number of countries BECAUSE of this ridiculous crisis I happened to be one of MANY observers, and certainly one of the least qualified among them to tell you that exactly what DID happen WOULD happen. Meanwhile YOU claimed the opposite. And you think WE don't know what we are talking about? Do you not live in an evidence based world? I said something would happen, it did, the theories and observations of economics I subscribe to have superior predictive qualities than yours, that means your theories and observations of economics are inferior and incorrect.

What "Republican policies" pumped up the housing bubble. Please name policies as well as who supported them.

Quite a lot going a LONG way back before Clinton.

And while the near zero interest rates and hard push to speculation in land and bad credit housing loans that did happen under BUSH were pretty hefty in contributing to the crisis it was largely inevitable that this would happen since REAGAN deregulated the financial markets and made it legal for them to trade in debt as if it were an asset. Something which had been regulated and restricted prior to that because LAST time it was allowed something VERY SIMILAR TO THIS happened.

What "Republican policies" pumped up the housing bubble. Please name policies as well as who supported them.

Oh for fuck's sake, Tzor, we had this argument already. It is *in* the thread that Frank just linked to. Article two of the 2004 Republican Party national Platform.

We support the President’s goal of increasing the number of minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million families by the end of the decade. Since President Bush announced his initiative in 2002, an additional 1.6 million minorities have become homeowners. The Self-Help Homeownership Opportunities Program helps low-income families purchase a home. The most significant barrier to homeownership is the down payment. We support efforts to reduce that barrier, like the American Dream Downpayment Act and Zero Downpayment Mortgages.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/papers_pdf/25850.pdf

tzor wrote: Edit: Frank was kind enough to actually give a link ... the post was dated 11 Sep 2008. It would be another year before the first of the PIGS of Europe, Greece, would start to fall.

The recession started in june 2007. So if you hadn't noticed that it was happening by 2008, what is wrong with you?

It started in the US in '07, but to be fair to tzor it was much localized then.

Moreover, this is getting real silly. While it's easy to blame the Bush administration for various policies that lowered or de-regulated mortgage/lending companies, the truth is more complicated.

Those companies had tons of their own employees who did things to run their own companies to the ground, for short-term personal gain. If you're a lending company, it's not the government who's supposed to check who you're lending the money to.

It's really just another chapter in corporate irresponsibility which has been plaguing big business since Enron.

You talk like corporate responsibility is this unpredictable but inevitable new thing.

It's been around since forever, we know all about it, successive administrations in the US and the western world in general have done NOTHING to regulate it or reign it in, and have in fact actively deregulated and encouraged such behavior.

Enron and bundled sub prime loans are the INEVITABLE and PREDICTABLE outcomes of the current financial regulatory structures in the US and beyond. And as such Ronald Reagan is the most profound root cause of this crisis because HE deregulated the financial market's ability to trade in debt as if it were an asset. Among other things.

Everyone else since has contributed, but their largest contributions have been (and continue to be) not fixing that mistake, indeed typically the only difference between administrations in the US since then has been the degree by which they compounded the problem further with ADDITIONAL and very SIMILAR mistakes. Again, near zero interest rates? Anything Alan "oops it looks like all my crazy economic theories were wrong, my bad" Greenspan ever did? etc...

Juton wrote:

tzor wrote:Yes indeed the guy who thought Obama was a "moderate." What a laugh. You wrap up convenient lies and call them inconvenient truths.

Obama is a moderate. A moderate Republican. From working with the GOP to keep the tax cuts, not ending either of the wars or closing gitmo to the healthcare plan that forces people to buy insurance. Admit it Tzor, if he wasn't black and wasn't a 'Democrat' the GOP would hold him in higher regards than either Bush.

Yeah. Obama calls letting the ridiculous tax cuts ride as a "compromise". I call it "Bending over and taking it up the ass like a little bitch".

Ah, and all this talk (on both sides, as both a good and bad thing) of CHANGE when he came in. There were people portraying him (again, as both good and bad) as being a scion of Tzeench, the lord of Change. Granted, McCain was portrayed as Nurgle, which is pretty apt, and Papa Nurgle would LOVE the current health care of America, but still.

And to think I haven't been checking up on this thread regularly. I do enjoy a fracas.

Juton wrote:Obama is a moderate. A moderate Republican. From working with the GOP to keep the tax cuts, not ending either of the wars or closing gitmo to the healthcare plan that forces people to buy insurance. Admit it Tzor, if he wasn't black and wasn't a 'Democrat' the GOP would hold him in higher regards than either Bush.

I disagree. He is clearly a progressive Democrat. He's a pretty crappy politician, but he had the nack of knowing how to get the people to vote for him.

I put him in lower regards than Bush jr.
I'm not so sure about Bush sr ... he was really a blah president.
He is definitely well above Carter.
But well below Clinton.

Please note I am one of those people who want to draft J.C. Watts for President. I'm also one who might be able to tollerate Hillary.

Zinegata wrote:It started in the US in '07, but to be fair to tzor it was much localized then.

Moreover, this is getting real silly. While it's easy to blame the Bush administration for various policies that lowered or de-regulated mortgage/lending companies, the truth is more complicated.

Truth? They don't want to hear truth, they just want to bash Bush.

tzor wrote:

Juton wrote:Obama is a moderate. A moderate Republican. From working with the GOP to keep the tax cuts, not ending either of the wars or closing gitmo to the healthcare plan that forces people to buy insurance. Admit it Tzor, if he wasn't black and wasn't a 'Democrat' the GOP would hold him in higher regards than either Bush.

I disagree. He is clearly a progressive Democrat. He's a pretty crappy politician, but he had the nack of knowing how to get the people to vote for him.

I put him in lower regards than Bush jr.
I'm not so sure about Bush sr ... he was really a blah president.
He is definitely well above Carter.
But well below Clinton.

Please note I am one of those people who want to draft J.C. Watts for President. I'm also one who might be able to tollerate Hillary.

I think we have a problem here with our definitions. Obama definitely isn't what progressive Democrat voters wanted, and I defy you to justify how he is. Democrat politicians have an annoying habit of being spineless, so I wouldn't call Obama spineless, it takes one to go against your party and your voter base for a reason I can't fathom.

I think Obama is acting like a moderate Republican would act, again I defy you how a McCain administration would differ greatly than this Obama administration. To most moderate Republican's credit I think they wouldn't like a situation like this even if McCain was in office.

That's the big disconnect in American politics, both parties give their bases trinkets while they cater to their donors. Most of the really powerful sectors have bough off both.

Obama did actually push through healthcare and repealling DADT, which are "progressive".

However, Obama does have a lot of progressive rhetoric which he doesn't actually follow up on. Closing Gitmo for instance.

Personally, I like Obama a lot more now. He's much more centrist, which allows him to filter out some of the more batshit insane ideas that ideologically-driven people on both sides are proposing.

Zinegata, please either present one batshit insane idea proposed by the Democratic Party in the last two years or admit that your bullshit false-equivalence is bullshit.

To pre-empt any call for one from the Republican party, I present (rolls dice): The Five-Year Spending Freeze, supported by 93% of the Republican Caucus in the middle of an economic crisis.

If you can find something that is even in the same ballpark of insanity as that being supported by even 51% of the Democratic caucus, I will shut the hell up.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Zinegata, please either present one batshit insane idea proposed by the Democratic Party in the last two years or admit that your bullshit false-equivalence is bullshit.

To do so would be a complete waste of time, because you know damn well that you're not going to admit to them anyway.

So please, fuck off with your challenge to a pissing match. I don't need to justify myself to you.

Especially to someone who is so utterly convinced that government spending = economic growth in all cases, when lots of historical examples already exist that show that they can actually cause total system collapse.

So decrying a spending freeze as something totally insane when it's precisely what a lot of European countries are doing (and in fact are reducing their spending) is precisely the sort of ideological fuckwitness that Obama would do well to ignore.

Zinegata wrote:Especially to someone who is so utterly convinced that government spending = economic growth in all cases, when lots of historical examples already exist that show that they can actually cause total system collapse.

Please present one example of my claiming that all government spending equals economic growth (or agreeing with someone who did).

Please present one historical example of... wait, what 'they' are you referring to? That clause of your sentence fails to connect in a basic grammatical way.

Anyway, I'd appreciate it if you could back up anything you said, y'know, ever; rather than relying on unsourced declarative statements. You're simply not credible, and continuing to not defend your theses isn't helping you on that score.

For reference, the liberal Paul Krugman said of the spending freeze: "That's not a retrogression to Herbert Hoover; even Hoover knew better than that." , while the conservative David Brooks simply said "That is insane."

Why is it insane?

Matt Yglesias wrote:Basically, you can imagine a school that today is serving a certain number of children and has a certain budget. Well, over the course of five years the population will grow and the number of kids in that school will also increase. But the school won't get any additional money. Instead, because there's inflation, the school will actually be getting less money even as it needs to teach more children. And so on across the board for federal programs.

That Zinegata supports hyper-neo-Hooverism is all anyone should need to dismiss anything he ever has to say on the subject of the economy.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Zinegata, please either present one batshit insane idea proposed by the Democratic Party in the last two years or admit that your bullshit false-equivalence is bullshit.

I'll echo this request, since I also believe Zinegata is using a false equivalence and have a more gracious rep on which to perhaps draw out your interest.

I really think you're out to lunch on this one, Zinegata. Austerity in a recession is almost always a mistake. The IMF actually admitted its Argentinian plan was a cockup waste just about a few years before forgetting it ever said anything and the EU should eat shit and die.

It will help to bear in mind the difference between short-term, one-time expenditures in a recession which will not have a crowding-out effect due to a dried-up private sector, and long-term profligate spending. You can't buy everyone a golden toilet twice a year and expect to run a surplus, but that's nothing like dropping a few hundred billion on a depressed construction sector to provide necessary, one-time infrastructure upgrades that were never going to get done otherwise.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:...

What part of "it's a complete waste of time to talk to you" do you not understand?

You're just another idiotic voice on the Internet who's talking out of his ass in an effort to claim moral superiority (which nobody gives a shit about).

Screw you. I don't give a shit what you say. Go ahead and declare that "I wins the Internet forever".

I'll echo this request, since I also believe Zinegata is using a false equivalence and have a more gracious rep on which to perhaps draw out your interest.

Yes you do (re: gracious rep). You I can talk to .

mean_liar wrote:I really think you're out to lunch on this one, Zinegata. Austerity in a recession is almost always a mistake. The IMF actually admitted its Argentinian plan was a cockup waste just about a few years before forgetting it ever said anything and the EU should eat shit and die.

It will help to bear in mind the difference between short-term, one-time expenditures in a recession which will not have a crowding-out effect due to a dried-up private sector, and long-term profligate spending. You can't buy everyone a golden toilet twice a year and expect to run a surplus, but that's nothing like dropping a few hundred billion on a depressed construction sector to provide necessary, one-time infrastructure upgrades that were never going to get done otherwise.

While I agree that the Keynesian model (make people dig holes) has merit to get people out of a recession, I believe it works primarily when the problem is a lack of liquidity in the economy. Pump more money into the economy, and actual stuff starts getting done more which gets people out of unemployment. In particular, get the money to poor people who will actually spend the money - as opposed to richer people who will just keep the money in the bank (and exacerbate the liquidity problem).

And you know I agree with you re spending on construction, as we discussed that aspect before.

The problem is that in the current crisis, I'm not sure if it's really a liquidity problem. Hence pumping more money into the economy would not actually result in killing the recession - it may just result in inflation. There are lots of cases where simply printing money caused hyper-inflation that resulted in total economic collapse - despite the fact the economy was actually growing due to massive government spending (i.e. Russia 1917).

It is worth noting that these cases also involve a less-than-stellar fiscal policy and monitoring instruments. Which had been shown to be rather lacking in the US due to the latest mortgage crisis.

So until people show actual numbers that liquidity is the problem (or something that requires spending), and not some other aspect of the economy (i.e. stopping all the money leaking to foreign investments due to outsourcing, fixing the monitoring of the banks, etc), I would be leery about increasing America's debt any further and risking either bankruptcy or inflation.

tl;dr: Increasing US government spending won't necessarily fix things unless they actually spend on the right things, so a spending freeze or even a decrease in spending is not a necessarily insane idea.

Zinegata wrote:What part of "it's a complete waste of time to talk to you" do you not understand?

I guess that would be the part where you based it on your assertion that I hold a belief that I don't hold.

At this point, I've moved on to openly mocking you while making my own well-sourced arguments. Seriously, I asked you to provide any support for any of your statements, so I might be able to take them seriously, and you responded with ad hominems. mean_liar asked the same, and you responded with ...wait for it... another unsupported statement.

So yes, pointing and laughing at you. If you want me to shut the hell up, I already put a price on that.

Zinegata wrote:While I agree that the Keynesian model (make people dig holes) has merit to get people out of a recession, I believe it works primarily when the problem is a lack of liquidity in the economy.

I think you might be abusing the word "liquidity".

http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/02/news/ec ... /index.htm

Keynesian spending primarily addresses a lack of demand, not a lack of liquidity. Rich folks/corporations sitting on a pile of money - as they are doing now - means that there's a lot of liquidity in the market. Liquidity just means that there's money (and "money") to be lent and spent, and we've got plenty of that. The root issue is that there is no demand, so you need to spark that.

Zinegata wrote:The problem is that in the current crisis, I'm not sure if it's really a liquidity problem. Hence pumping more money into the economy would not actually result in killing the recession - it may just result in inflation. There are lots of cases where simply printing money caused hyper-inflation that resulted in total economic collapse - despite the fact the economy was actually growing due to massive government spending (i.e. Russia 1917).

Firstly, "money" these days is a plastic concept. It's not "printed dollar bills". Printing money doesn't really mean what it did a century+ ago.

http://www.columbia.edu/%7Emw2230/IFcashless2.doc



So not only is "printed bills" not really an issue, "liquidity" isn't an issue either. Honestly I don't know what you mean by that, since that was really only an issue around the time they were starting to implement TARP.

Zinegata wrote:So until people show actual numbers that liquidity is the problem (or something that requires spending), and not some other aspect of the economy (i.e. stopping all the money leaking to foreign investments due to outsourcing, fixing the monitoring of the banks, etc), I would be leery about increasing America's debt any further and risking either bankruptcy or inflation.

Well, there it is above. Liquidity isn't a problem, but that's not what Keynesian spending addresses. Monitoring of banks? I don't really know what you're trying to say there, as while doing so will prevent future crises but has little to do with the US or world economy in the moment.


And there still remains this:

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Zinegata, please either present one batshit insane idea proposed by the Democratic Party in the last two years or admit that your bullshit false-equivalence is bullshit.

tzor wrote:Truth? They don't want to hear truth, they just want to bash Bush.

Hey wait... what?

In the myopic view of Tzor and his ilk blaming Ronald Reagan, Alan Green Span and every single American president and administration since Ronald Reagan to varying degrees is "just wanting to bash Bush".

Why should I "just": bash Bush, I mean sure his contribution was notably worse than say, Clinton's, but both were negative, and both to some degree less of a root cause than Reagan's and less of a long term personal project than Greenspan's.

And Bush pretty much agreed with ME on the whole "it's a crisis, and it's big!" thing back when Tzor still did not so I mean, the man gets SOME things right, or at least more right than Tzor. So I can certainly hold off on the apparently exclusive Bush bashing long enough to point out that even a world famous imbecile was capable of putting two and two together and noticing and admitting to the world economic crisis we are in faster than Tzor did. And that INCLUDES time for extra hesitation because it was partially his own fault and black eye for his economic philosophy.

Edit: Extra points to Tzor for pulling the "Bush Bashing" line moments after demanding "one single Republican policy" that lead to economic crisis, especially after ALREADY being linked to a thread all about that. "Bash republicans if you dare!, No wait, you already did, no wait, you guys are just mindlessly bashing republicans, WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT ? NO ONE ASKED YOU TO DO THAT OMG!!!!"

mean_liar wrote:Keynesian spending primarily addresses a lack of demand, not a lack of liquidity. Rich folks/corporations sitting on a pile of money - as they are doing now - means that there's a lot of liquidity in the market. Liquidity just means that there's money (and "money") to be lent and spent, and we've got plenty of that. The root issue is that there is no demand, so you need to spark that.

I would define liquidity as not the amount of money in circulation, but the amount of money actually changing hands on a daily basis.

Hence it being "liquid".

Because as you noted - and I had also already noted - money that's just sitting in banks ain't actually doing much for the economy.

How would you call this kind of thing then?

So not only is "printed bills" not really an issue, "liquidity" isn't an issue either. Honestly I don't know what you mean by that, since that was really only an issue around the time they were starting to implement TARP.

You're gonna have to explain to me what that BOGAMBSL means. Because the article linked certainly doesn't. I sort of think you're meaning "There's a huge money supply vs the actual consumer spending", but the graph is far from clear to me as to what it's trying to say.

Moreover, the amount of money - physical or virtual (of which the latter now forms a large portion of the world's supply) - is still immaterial to "liquidity", as I defined it.

And there still remains this:

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Zinegata, please either present one batshit insane idea proposed by the Democratic Party in the last two years or admit that your bullshit false-equivalence is bullshit.

First of all, it's a bullshit troll by angel. Because he's making it a Democratic Party vs Republican party thing, when I said "ideologically-driven people on both sides are proposing".

So what I'm referring to are the extreme left and extreme right positions, not the rank-and-file Democrats or Republicans. And while Denners like to think Republicans are all batshit insane, I'm more inclined to believe that's a gross hyperbole or else the world is already well and truly doomed.

I'm willing to clarify this to you, because I think you'd actually give it a fair shake. Most people here though will just scream "FALSE EQUIVALENCY!" until they're hoarse because they're just that fucking bored.

Anyway, as to what I'm referring to:

1) Health Care. Don't get me wrong. I support universal health care. But attempting to push through health care regardless of the situation - i.e. having a recession going on - was stupid adherence to ideology as opposed to political sense.

The result is a flawed, compromised bill that something like 70% of America hates and wants repealed - including very many Democrats.

2) GITMO. Yes, GITMO is bad. But Obama's been dealt this hand, and he shouldn't have promised to close it.

Especially since he didn't actually check if people were willing to take these prisoners. Or if, when handed over to governments like Yemen, the prisoners ended up getting released and just went back to suicide-bombing.

Plus, the whole civilian trial deal, when it was pretty clear by that point that only military trials would work due to the way the previous administration had compromised the situation.

In short, I'm unhappy whenever people make decisions based on ideological purity, as opposed to dealing with the actual problem at hand. Obama, post mid-terms, is showing quite a lot more political common sense.

----

BTW, speaking of GITMO, have you seen Labyrinth?

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/ ... -on-terror

No, it's not the maze boardgame. It's a CDG from GMT about the War on Terror. It features Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech as a pro-Jihadist card .

I would define liquidity as not the amount of money in circulation, but the amount of money actually changing hands on a daily basis.

Hence it being "liquid".

Because as you noted - and I had also already noted - money that's just sitting in banks ain't actually doing much for the economy.

How would you call this kind of thing then?

Market liquidity is the degree to which something can be bought or sold without affecting that thing's price. So if there is no cash in the system, there is a dearth of liquidity, because in order to make large purchases, people have to trade real commodities like gold and oil back and forth, which causes large commodity price fluctuations.

The amount of money that actually is sold back and forth is a function of monetary velocity, which is a very different matter.

-Username17

I kindly ask for a clarification:

When you say "Money that is actually sold back and forth", does this refer exclusively to bonds and foreign currency exchange, or does this encompass money simply changing hands because of a transaction - i.e. "I paid $5 to the taxi driver, so $5 changed hands".

If it's the latter, then yes, that's what I'm referring to and it should be termed monetary velocity then.

EDIT: Checking wikipedia, yes, it looks to be "Velocity of Money"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money

Doubled Edit:

Also found an article that more or less sums up why the Velocity of Money is actually one of the key factors of this recession:

http://news.goldseek.com/MillenniumWave ... 326748.php

A Slowdown in Velocity

Now, why is the velocity of money slowing down? Notice the real rise in V from 1990 through about 1997. Growth in M2 (see the above chart) was falling during most of that period, yet the economy was growing. That means that velocity had to rise faster than normal. Why? Primarily because of the financial innovations introduced in the early 90's like securitizations, CDOs, etc. It is financial innovation that spurs above trend growth in velocity.

And now we are watching the Great Unwind of financial innovations, as they went to excess and caused a credit crisis. In principle, a CDO or subprime asset backed security should be a good thing. And in the beginning they were. But then standards got loose, greed kicked in and Wall Street began to game the system. End of game.

What drove velocity to new highs is no longer part of the equation. Its absence is slowing things down. If the money supply did not rise significantly to offset that slowdown in velocity the economy would already be in a much deeper recession.

I don't entirely agree that upping the money supply is the ideal situation in this case, as it can increase inflation if there's not enough monetary velocity (also explain earlier in the article). But it does reinforce my view that fixing the economy will involve much more than just "Let's up demand!".