Posted on 05/14/2009 7:21:52 PM PDT by bigbob
There is a long list of professions that failed to see the financial crisis brewing. Wall Street bankers and deal-makers top it, but banking regulators are on it as well, along with the Federal Reserve. Politicians and journalists have shared the blame, as have mortgage lenders and even real estate agents.
But what about economists? Of all the experts, weren't they the best equipped to see around the corners and warn of impending disaster?
(Excerpt) Read more at knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu ...
Since we know the media will play politics and not tell the real story, it's up to us to educate ourselves so we can hold elected officials accountable for corrective actions and not mere political grandstanding.
It IS rational for financial firms to try and avoid lawsuits, protests in their lobbies, and the ire of regulators.
That is why the loans were made.
It is rational to try and profit from “other people’s money” and that is why so many financial firms were involved in mortgage backed securities.
Notice that NOBODY in Congress is really presenting any reforms such as:
Require at least a 5% down payment on any new mortgage, or a 5% equity position in the underlying home, before the mortgage lender can sell that loan to anyone else.
Require at least a 10% equity position, at the time of securitization, for any mortgage which is bundled with other mortgages.
Prohibit income from welfare, food stamps or unemployment compensation, in the determination of income qualifications.
It’s a sh6t and shinola thing.
Oh, I don’t know. Some people predicted it, including some on this very forum (like Hydroshock and GodGunsGuts). I have a dear friend who has access to high-level international finance experts, and he warned me in late 2004 to get out of my house, sell sell sell, rent a house and wait until the market crashed before buying. He saw it coming, his advisors saw it, and they warned me how inconceivably bad it was going to be (and they say it is very far from being over, that things are going to get worse). So if they could figure it out, why couldn’t the more popular public-figure economists?
The article does not address the fundamentals of mortgage
qualifications were thrown out by the Democrat
Congress.
Your numbers are correct plus in many instances closing costs were financed.
Could it be that this social engineering debacle
crashed the Industry?
When heads of reg agency are appointed with people connected to Wall Street, when Congress takes donations from Wall Street, it is not hard for Wall Street and government to screw up. Take subprime, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for instance. Bill Clinton discovered that to bypass GOP control of Congress and tax hikes for his domestic agenda, Clinton found that if he created a government program that allows Wall Street to participate and profit, despite its faulty program model, it will succeed and be protected by Wall Street once the money starts to roll in from commissions, fees and etc. Do you know how many Wall Street companies were willing participants of subprime and Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae mortgage notes and made tons of money in it. When regulators get concern, these government/Wall Street participants simply call their Congressmen to muzzle the regulators, until the whole system blows up. Now the politicians express shock and the Wall Street participants are hung out to dry in public to placate taxpayer outrage. Every time I hear Obama is fighting with Wall Street, I say they both deserve each other. The GOP should stay out and let the two offending institutions kill each other.
This article is not exactly accurate. The Austrian School of Economics foresaw this collapse over 80 years ago. In addition they predicted the 1929 great depression and also explained why we have suffered booms and busts continuously since the formation of the Fed in 1913. In addition they totally foresaw the complete depreciation of the dollar through inflation. I guess these guys never heard of Hayek, von Mises and Murray Rothbard.
Another classic example of this illusion is the whole global warming model business.
Large numbers of assumptions and scientific wild ass guesses are fed into a computer which then spits out extremely precise predictions. Yet since the input data was a wild ass guess the end product is by definition also a wild ass guess. It just doesn't matter how you manipulate the data in the interim.
I see a similar bias when using meters in my work. The digital versions, which read down to a .1 level, are often assumed to be more accurate than the analog version because of the way they read out, although both are really only accurate to within a .5 range.
To be fair, we also had booms and busts before that, many of them a good deal more dramatic than most we have had since.
These same “experts” had no clue that the USSR was going to implode either. The entire Ivy League educated cadre of economists who roost on Wall St. are obviously overpaid for the thin gruel of wisdom they serve the nation.
Noted and wise economists saw a disaster approaching; they were just not on the approved White House list of economists.
The difference was that the purchasing power of the dollar either stayed the same or increased. The Fed’s cure for the cycle is to print money. From 1790 to 1913 the average annual inflation rate was .12 percent. From 1913 to now the dollar has lost more that 95 percent of its value. Prior to creation of the Fed, recessions and depressions were shorter lived and the market corrected itself. No longer the case. And most of these busts occurred after credit expansions which resulted in bank busts and credit contractions and deflations.
My wife and I saw the realestate crisis coming when they started giving 100% loans for all comers depending on bad appraisals. We sold our CA income property in late 2005 and bailed out of the stock market later in 2007.
Our financial newsletter was seeing the same things.
People on this forum refused to believe in the realestate bubble..
Congress is responsible for it.
True enough. It is also true that there has been far greater expansion of true wealth and prosperity in the last hundred years than in the 100 before that.
Possibly such growth in prosperity could have been achieved without the dollar dropping in value by this amount, but it is at least equally possible that relatively mild inflation encourages wealth production.
IOW, there are costs and benefits of having a Fed, as there are for any policy. If one focuses solely on the costs, it is easy to assume that without the Fed those costs could have been avoided. It is possible this is true, but it is absolutely true that there would have been costs to not having a Fed in control of the money supply, and nobody really knows what those would have been.
Great moves! I knew real estate was over when I was in Vegas in 2006. On the back of virtually every cab was an ad for “No money down, $692 per month, interest only, 3 bedroom 2 bath townhouse. I realized that if they had to do no money down and interest only that they couldn’t sell these places otherwise and that only the lowest of the low were available to buy. However, in the Northeast, it never got like that. Sure, subprime mortgages were available but the new building supply wasn’t there due to strict zoning and obnoxious regulations.
You’re absolutely right. The Fed was created to end booms and busts, promote full employment and economic stability. It has failed miserably as of late, for sure. Much of what happened in the past was done by politicians. The death knell was FDR’s taking us off the gold standard and NIXON closing the gold window. Once these measures were taken, the end of our fiat currency were assured. The problem with the ability to create unlimited amounts of fiat currency is that politicians will resort to it as a hidden tax and eventually destroy the currency as is happening now. They can’t help themselves, in any country and any time in history. I say that the progress we have made in the past 100 years has been in spite of the government and the Fed, not because of it.
While the Fed has been effective in eliminating bank run since the ‘30’s some argue that the bank run is actually a healthy fear for bankers. It keeps them making prudent loans and forces them to not overleverage.
In any event, what would have happened without the Fed these past almost hundred years is academic. What is happening to our dollar now and has happened is not. Deflation, or the rising value of the dollar occurs from a stable money supply and increasing productivity. But it isn’t anything we will have to worry about any longer.
Of course it could be! Unintended consequences.
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