Digging through the past can often be productive.How is that we aren’t hearing more about this old news story about a meeting between the banksters and President Obama from 2009?
[At a meeting in the White House between 13 bank CEOs and President Obama,] some bankers gave explanations for the industry’s high salaries, such as “competing for talent on an international market.” But, President Obama cut them off. “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” the president told them. The CEOs might have guessed they were in for a rough go of it. They found themselves gathered at a table with nothing more than a single glass of water at each seat. No food, no other beverages, no ice — no refills, even.
Well, banksters, they’re HEEERRRRRRRRREEE! Though they haven’t yet brought pitchforks, if you don’t change your ways, you may get a bad case of “hay fever” (if you know what I mean…).
Help me out here. So the pitchforked masses are pissed off at wall street because the masses were given credit to buy things they couldn’t afford?
Super Id, just because he was using pitchforks as a metaphor doesn’t mean you’ll get off building straw men.
Be an honest broker for a change and accept the man for what he means, rather than for what you think he means so you can feebly use that erroneous interpretation to try and make some juvenile point. Really, if making straw men and juvenile points is the only reason you’re here, then I pity you for the lack of meaning in your life.
Contrary to what Fox Nation has had drummed into them, what crashed the economy was not people taking out loans they couldn’t afford. Wall Street’s perfidy, aided and abetted by the rating agencies carrying water for them, did.
Super Id: If you think the middle class crashed the economy then you clearly need some combination of psychotropic drugs, economics classes and a good immersion in the history of the financial collapse.
Your physician (if you’re lucky enough to have health insurance) can prescribe the drugs, but you’ll need to fire up the Intertubes to get the rest. Frankly, I don’t have the patience (or the interest) to do your homework for you.
But you might start with this history of the global collapse and it’s causes. It’s video so you don’t actually have to read anything.
I’m not exonerating wall street. They extended credit to people that should not have been given credit. That being said, it takes two to tangle and there was no shortage of people asking for credit to buy real estate and consumer goods that they could not afford. Regardless, of wall streets’ sin of turning subprime debt into AAA bonds, (aka Tommy Boy, you can but a guarantee on a box) there is no collapse at all, if people made their payments. I have a hard time feeling sympathetic to to the debtors who racked up the debt and are now complaining that they have to pay it back.
By the way, if any of you are in public employees unions, your pension funds were the largest purchasers of of the mortgage backed securities. What the heck were your fund managers thinking? Doesn’t a triple A bond that is paying 300 basis points more than corporate paper raise some questions?