* If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that bring John Lennon back? Would it cure asthma? Would it cure AIDS? Etc.
Little kids formulate more intelligent arguments than this when they’re trying to get out of being punished.
* The game is as old as time. Divide and conquer.
It works on even the people that see it. Steve is an intellectual so he hates businessman. He wants a strong white culture but where is any power supposed to come from if a group gives up trying to win? Almost every win at some point derives from strong businessmen.
* That’s unreal. Of course it could really be used as a retort for any policy under deliberation. For example, would raising the tax rates end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the L.G.B.T. community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?
* In my hopeful moments I wonder whether the last 8 years (I’m including the election season) has soured a majority of the American electorate on identity politics to a degree that Hillary would be rejected. It’s been so downright exhausting, and I have to wonder whether continuing the grinding (this time with sex in place of race) would be enough of a turn off to people to preclude a Hillary administration.
* Before thrifts were allowed to “grow their way out of their problems” with “reforms” during the Carter and especially the Reagan administrations, regulation was as simple as pie or maybe you forgot all those jokes about bankers hours.
Back then all a thrift could do was make residential real estate loans which were single family houses and housing blocks with under 4 units. That is why you see so many 4 blocks in the older parts of a city. You tend to see them as the duplex on the bottom floor and the duplexes on the top or the 4 townhouse unit like the Monopoly game apartments.
The thrifts took in deposits and made safe well documented home loans. They paid out more in interest than banks and charged less for home loans. That was their niche and the commercial banks got the rest.
As long as interest rates stayed constant and low everything was fine. They started offering assumable mortgages just before interest rates went haywire and money market funds started sucking away their deposits.
Unless the bank is involved in criminal activity, how difficult is it to determine if the bank is solvent when you only have a few main variables in a linear equation? You have your depositors accounts and the interest rate. You have the home loans and the interest rate. You have your costs and the amount of money you have set aside for loan losses. You have the number of problem loans and a reasonable determination of what the default rate will be and the percentage of the loan recoverable in foreclosure. There isn’t much more than that.
The problem was that the House of Representatives biggest source of campaign cash was S&Ls which were usually smallish 1-3 branch office operations. Carter was supposedly given a report that it would cost 15 billion to wind down all the bad thrifts and roll the whole industry up. The FSLIC would have had more money for that operation but the deposit insurance rate had been reduced at the behest of the industry many years before. The roll-up wasn’t popular with the thrift owners, many who would be wiped out if they were insolvent beyond all reasonable help.
As is usual they turn to the “experts” from the industry who deduce that the way out is to allow thrifts to branch out and make new loans so that the old assumable mortgages would be a much smaller percentage of their whole portfolio. When Carter’s deregulation didn’t fix the problem they do what they always do and dig the hole deeper. This also makes regulation a lot tougher since the mix of loans is more complex. Now add in a gutted regulatory agency, the ability to accept deposits from anywhere in the country, and sleazy developers buying thrifts so they can have their own private piggy bank and you get the mess it became.
* “Made her” take her clothes off?
If the late 20th Century taught me anything, it’s that girls will take off all their clothes, outside, in public, for photos (or just casual delectation), for damn near anything: art, civil rights, slut walks, peace rallies, rock concerts, anything.
All they need is some authority figure to tell them it’s OK, and they’ll get nekkid as a jaybird.
