The 2008 US Election thread

[Tyrones own]

What exactly have i made up and i'll be glad to explain it to you!

Just as i thought, you remind me of a hurry up and hold me back type of lad Stephenite.......how embarrassing

[tyssam5]

What exactly have i made up and i'll be glad to explain it to you!

the rest of you in a competition as to who can be the biggest
embarrassment on a subject that has A) nothing at all to do with ye
and B) has been fairly obvious now for 36 pages that most of you know little to nothing about
bar what ye read in your leftist blogs.....but hey feel free to vent that pent up anger and blinkered hatred!
-----------------------------
You made that up.

[Tyrones own]

Are you boys.............. You left a very important word out of it that renders it a question
Ok I'm guilty of making up a question *shakes head* 
Empty vessels the lot of ye

[stephenite]

You stated that Bill Clinton started the current entire economic mess with leglislation he signed back in 1992, I asked you what piece of leglislation and you told me to go and look for it myself, now considering you bought it up, the burden of proof rests with you, but I did try and search for it and I cannot find anything that Bill Clinton signed that started the current economic downturn.
Therefore you either a) Made it up or b) have access to online data that I don't that definitively prove Clinton's role in the current global crisis, which if you had I'd be interested in seeing it.

It's only fair I give you the option of proving me wrong - but I think you're lying

[J70]

Clinton didn't take office until January 1993 by the way.

[stephenite]

This has been doing the rounds here on left wing radio stations too, could you please explain how McCain can be tied to this
crisis but with not a single mention to the fact that Bill Clinton signed a Bill in '92 that got this whole thing on the path to
the slippery slope

Oh dear

[stephenite]

What exactly have i made up and i'll be glad to explain it to you!

how embarrassing

[Tyrones own]

You stated that Bill Clinton started the current entire economic mess with leglislation he signed back in 1992, I asked you what piece of leglislation and you told me to go and look for it myself, now considering you bought it up, the burden of proof rests with you, but I did try and search for it and I cannot find anything that Bill Clinton signed that started the current economic downturn.
Therefore you either a) Made it up or b) have access to online data that I don't that definitively prove Clinton's role in the current global crisis, which if you had I'd be interested in seeing it.

It's only fair I give you the option of proving me wrong - but I think you're lying

Really..

One of the most frequently asked questions about the subprime market meltdown and housing crisis is: How did the government get so deeply involved in the housing market?


The answer is: President Clinton wanted it that way.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even into the early 1990s, weren't the juggernauts they'd later be.

While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules.
                                                                             1992
In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potent mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse.

Despite warnings of trouble at Fannie and Freddie, in 1994 Clinton unveiled his National Homeownership Strategy, which broadened the CRA in ways Congress never intended.

Addressing the National Association of Realtors that year, Clinton bluntly told the group that "more Americans should own their own homes." He meant it.

Clinton saw homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.

Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin's Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995.

The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.

Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else.

"Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group and race, to rate banks on performance," wrote Howard Husock, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute.

But those rules weren't enough.

Clinton got the Department of Housing and Urban Development to double-team the issue. That would later prove disastrous.

Clinton's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, "made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis," the liberal Village Voice noted. Among those decisions were changes that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in a big way.

Other rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage, allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments, vs. 10% for banks.

Since they could borrow at lower rates than banks due to implicit government guarantees for their debt, the government-sponsored enterprises boomed.

With incentives in place, banks poured billions of dollars of loans into poor communities, often "no doc" and "no income" loans that required no money down and no verification of income.

By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion U.S. mortgage market -- a staggering exposure.

Worse still was the cronyism.

Fannie and Freddie became home to out-of-work politicians, mostly Clinton Democrats. An informal survey of their top officials shows a roughly 2-to-1 dominance of Democrats over Republicans.

Then there were the campaign donations. From 1989 to 2008, some 384 politicians got their tip jars filled by Fannie and Freddie.

Over that time, the two GSEs spent $200 million on lobbying and political activities. Their charitable foundations dropped millions more on think tanks and radical community groups.

Did it work? Well, if measured by the goal of putting more poor people into homes, the answer would have to be yes.

From 1995 to 2005, a Harvard study shows, minorities made up 49% of the 12.5 million new homeowners.

The problem is that many of those loans have now gone bad, and minority homeownership rates are shrinking fast.

Fannie and Freddie, with their massive loan portfolios stuffed with securitized mortgage-backed paper created from subprime loans, are a failed legacy of the Clinton era.

[Tyrones own]

What exactly have i made up and i'll be glad to explain it to you!

how embarrassing

Seriously, what age are you?... 7 or 8, primary school youngsters wouldn't be at it

[mannix]

tyrones own,
who would you vote for and why?
keep it short and sweet, i am half puerto rican and cannot concentrate for more than 3 minutes.

[Maiden1]

What a redneck - brilliant

Ah yes.... yet another quality empty headed attempt at a retort

Seriously, with the exception of J70 who is at least willing to make an attempt to debate
his beliefs, are the rest of you in a competition as to who can be the biggest
embarrassment on a subject that has A) nothing at all to do with ye
and B) has been fairly obvious now for 36 pages that most of you know little to nothing about
bar what ye read in your leftist blogs.....but hey feel free to vent that pent up anger and blinkered hatred!
I actually left Ireland to get away from it...it's not healthy lads

No sh1t.  You have definitely indoctrinated yourself with the locals.  Where have you moved to Alabama or somewhere else in the deep south?

On a serious point you are obviously a supporter of McCain and the republican party where as a majority of Europeans would support Obama.  From your point of view what is good about the republicans that would make an Obama supporter change to support them.  Not what is wrong with Obama but what have the republicans done right over the last 8 years and will do in the future that is better than what the democrats would do?

[stephenite]

What exactly have i made up and i'll be glad to explain it to you!

how embarrassing

Seriously, what age are you?... 7 or 8, primary school youngsters wouldn't be at it

I'm really trying to flatter for you, given imitation is it's most sincerest form.

[muppet]

This isn't about a federal programme to give houses to the poor at an affordable rate.

The sub-prime time bomb was really created when mortgages were given at punitive rates to those who were highly unlikely to be able to pay. Those punitive reates initially generated massive yields which everyone in the capitalist world wanted part of. Every shareholder in every bank pointed to those yields and demanded the same. Everyone wanted a piece of the action. Unfortunately too many got it.

The real start of this whole cycle was the the fixing of the Chinese currency Yuan to the US Dollar. When the Bush administration later decided on a weak Dollar they did so in the knowledge that the standard of living in the States wouldn't take much of a hit as the Yuan was fixed to the Dollar, hence guaranteeing no change in the price of imports for China. However the Chinese ended up with a mountain of Dollars which they loaned back to the rest of the world at a very low interest rate. Hence the need for lower rates elsewhere.

Watching the US bi-polar politics at the moment is like watching two Neros blaming each other using violins. 

[stew]

As a die hard republician I have to say I am ashamed of the shift in tactics and the personal assaults on Obama. I would have been fine if the latest allegations had played out months ago but instead of playing their cards when they had them Mccain and the republicians waited until desperation set it before changing course towards extreme negativism and fear mongering. I hope the electorate see through it for what it is and shy away from being sucked into the Mccarthyesque fear mongering that Mccain has employed here.

McCain is going to lose, he seems to fear talking about the economy because he doesnt know what to do about it and if obama is any sort of orator at all he will steer the conversation back to what needs to get talked about which is the economy and away from who he broke bread with 40 years ago.

I feckin hate politicians.

Looks like I won't need a new shovel

I'd forgot about that. Obama has a 5-6 point lead and I think will seal the deal tonight.

That said there are a lot of Democrats out there who will find it very tough to vote for a black man, i know, i talked to several of them. I think they are ignorant but if there is enough of them, especially in the southern states that might sway the vote however I still think Obama is the next Prez, and maybe, just maybe that might not be so bad.

[DrinkingHarp]

Mother F#cking Son of B!tch  !!!!

The Executives at AIG who were just bailed out by the taxpayers decided they needed a vacation/relaxing session.

The Executives of AIG and their representatives of various AIG subsidiaries spent time partying it up at plush St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort in Southern California after the U.S. taxpayers bailed out AIG for $85 BILLION.

I URGE/REQUEST that anyone who reads this will not do business with such a greedy, hypocritical Mother F$#king company.

Just today I had 3 customers who owe me money for work I performed (trades) said that don't know how they can pay me. My suppliers, warehouse space still want their money and I don't know if I will be able to pay because there will be more following suit and then I'm f*@ked.

So when I got home to hear these Execs who make well over a few million a year and pissed up their own company needed their company bailed out and then have the tenacity to go on such a spree has me bewildered.

Had to rant or I might have a stroke