CNBC is owned by the government?

And what exactly does that have to do with anything? I don't remember him saying anything about shutting down the government... unless you are creating some new strawmen?

That's kinda not true. It just wasn't covered as highly. There is a clip around in youtube where he rails against TARP (where he is matched up against a guy who is saying it is needed to prevent total banking collapse) and basically ends up walking out on the segment.

Nope, but they are owned by GE who was bailed out by the government.

And how much of GE's financial services division (GE Capital) contributes to the NBC Universal division? Let's see the numbers.

And one can't criticize how their employer runs things? In that case, wow, none of us could talk about anything affecting our employer.

For someone so against bailouts, I'm just a bit surprised he wasn't screaming about the government bailout toward GE. It seems he conveniently skipped over that one during his rants.

And I have no problem with his view and know that he has been against many of the bailouts (despite how stupid that view is). I just think it's odd that he didn't rail against the bailout his employer got. I didn't hear a rant about who wants to pay Rick Santelli's paycheck. It also irked me that his most defiant and forceful rant was saved for regular Joe homeowners.

I think he handled it quite well with his statement about the problems with TARP back in September of last year.

Also from his statement after Gibbs mentioned him, where he said he was in favor of no bailouts, for the banks, insurance companies, or homeowners.

Hell, even the Daily Kos, of all places, says Santelli has been pretty consistent on all this:

Daily Kos: CNBC's Rick Santelli: I oppose all bailouts


I think if you asked him point blank about the GE bailout, he'd tell you he'd be against it as well. But he's not an anchor, he's a commentator. He gets asked questions by anchors of CNBC shows, and answers them.



Could it perhaps have been that it came right on the heels of the ~$800bil stimulus bill, a few months after the ~$700bil TARP bill? A feeling of when is enough, enough?

I know what Santelli's stance on bailouts has been. I watch him frequently rant. I do think his stances are foolish and not realistic (especially about the AIG bailout), so I was surprised that so many people took him serious.

Regardless of that, it just came across poorly to me. We had handed over trillions of dollars to major companies who knew the industry and fucked everyone over. He chose not to have his tea party and "loser" rant during the AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie/Freddie, Merrill, Citi, auto, GE, etc bailouts, but when some poor people were getting money. Just seems like he picked a bad time to do it.

.

Very well could have. Just think it was bad timing for him to finally decide enough is enough.

Should he have waited until the 3rd time we bailed out the automakers or something?

Or the first or second time we did. This was maybe the 20th bailout we've had and I just find it odd that he goes ballistic during the only one that involved helping poor people. Perhaps it's just a coincidence though.

Did Greenspan really advocate the "exotic" mortgages? When I see exotic, I think Interest Only and volatile variable rate mortgages. I seem to think that Greenspan's position a few years back was that the market was a bubble waiting to burst. So that part of what you say doesn't mesh with my take...but I can certainly be wrong. I don't follow the news, financial or otherwise like I used to.

On the "losers" who bought homes with sub-prime gimicky mortgages. For them, I have little to no sympathy. I just bought a home, and I reviewed pages and pages of payment schedules that clearly spelled out how much each of my payments for 30 years was going to be...how much principle would be reduced, and how much interest was being paid down. It wasn't rocket science. These people knew that they were taking a risk. If they weren't being realistic about it at the time, that certainly doesn't buy them any slack now.

So I guess I agree with Santelli(sp?)...except that he can't realistically make that argument on the floor of the stock exchange while "pimping" the financial bailout. So I agree with what he said, but he is still a moron.

To be fair, if I was planning on doing time in Fresno, I would probably want to know when my sentence was up.

The loser talk isn't always correct either. Yes there were a lot of people who bought homes above their heads, and a lot of people who didn't know what they were getting themselves into. But there were also a lot of people who were told that a home was a solid investment (by our government and all the experts), put down 20%, took out a mortgage they could afford, and got screwed in the process.

Take a friend of mine who bought a condo for $240,000. He put $60,000 down when he purchased the condo and the rest on a fixed mortgage. His condo has dropped dramatically in value because there are so many people selling right now. His place was appraised at $175,000 a couple weeks ago when he looked to refinance at a lower rate. He has also now had his hours cut back a lot thanks to our kickass economy.

So not everyone who is upside down or in trouble did it on their own. There are a lot of people who bought homes because the experts in and out of government told them it was a good investment. A lot of people unable to pay their mortgage right now because the bad economy which was caused by no fault of their own has cost them their job. People who now have to borrow against their home because their retirement lost 40% of its value (which they were told was strong investments).

I'm not saying that everyone is innocent. Those who were reckless deserve what they get. But this bad economy has hurt a lot of honest people through no fault of their own.

There are going to be ups and downs. Buy a house and it's a solid investment in 10-20 years. Not in 2.

I pretty much agree with this. Nice job, Rainmaker.

BTW, somebody tell Yahoo! News headlines that Jon Stewart is just a comedy show.

TV feud raises real questions
After Jon Stewart grills Jim Cramer, the public looks at financial pundits in the recession. » Were they honest?

• Obama spokesman 'enjoyed' lashing
• Beware of a false stock market

And in the sub "news" headlines, the Republicans get a mention!

• Analysis: Republican earmarks taint wasteful spending criticism




These are the things that shape my opinion that most of the news media is no different than Fox News, just slanted the other way.

Is it fair to say the boom created the bust? I mean, I knew people who were using "I could just go get my real estate license" as a fall back plan for guaranteed riches, in case whatever they were actually interested in didn't pan out. Then people started buying houses in the hopes of "flipping" them at a good profit. I get the idea this isn't happening as frequently.


It's like the dot-com bubble back at the turn of the century. There was just loads of capital being tossed around for any new internet startup idea, whether it had any legs or not, because it seemed like there was plenty of money to be made. The founders of these startups had their dreams getting realized, even though the long-term chances of success were at best shaky. Why wouldn't they take the risk, if they were being given the money to do so?

These banks were willing to throw money at just about any wannabe home owner, in the hopes of making a their money back ten fold. And there is never a shortage of wannabe homeowners, because, like running your own business, owning your own home is one of the key ideals of the American dream. They were offered the money for something that they couldn't pass up.

I guess, in the literal sense of the word, they were all losers. In the colloquial sense, I don't think so.

TARP did what it was intended to do FWIW and was only torpedoed after we were through the woods by Criminal Paulson.

Good article, glad to see this kind of hypocrisy doesn't go unnoticed.

I'd should not be surprising when a big "boom" is part of a bubble. When things are good, people are trying to "get theirs" (flipping houses and general over-pricing).

If you gamble during a bubble-boom you are being aggressive. And we all know that being aggressive gets you one of two things. More than you should've got....or fucked. If you buy a house with the intent to sell in 2 years and the bubble expands, you make easy money. If it bursts, the music has stopped and you find out you don't have a chair to sit in.

I bought a house in 2003 and sold it in 2005 and I "won" $9k. I don't know any other way for a guy like me (read: no cash) gets $9k for just enjoying living in a nice house for a couple of years. However, had I bought that same house in 2007, I would've sold it for a loss today.

On the flip-side. If you aren't trying to make a buck and are living within your means and willing to spent a long time in the house, the housing market will not affect you.

My parents bought a house for $225,000 in 1995. The value of their home has dropped $75k in the last year and if they sold today they would only be able to get $500,000 for it. (buying it in 1995 is the key here) And if they don't mind, they can chill out in their perfectly good house for another 5 years and probably sell it for $600k. Longevity obvously takes the sting away.

On a sad note, my great-great grandfather sold his beach house on Long Island in 1948 for less than $50k. The plot of land alone is worth multi-millions today and it's survived plenty of housing "crisis". Point remains, that if he wanted to, had he been able to keep that house long-term, it would've paid off.

The examples cited are from Louisana, Virginia, and New York respectively.

As long as it's the Republicans, I can assure you, it doesn't. :)

It's hard out here for a pimp.

riiiiiiiiiiiiiight

that horse is so tired it wants to be shot.

The black helicopters make sure of it.

I know you guys like missing the point just to be obnoxious, but I just have to spell it out again.

It's a condemnation on our media that a comedy show is asking the toughest questions about the economy, not a condemnation on the comedy show.

SI

This is going to get off track if we go too deep into this hear instead of the recession thread but I figured I'd throw this out there to you, Flasch.

I don't know if I've asked this to you yet, but isn't the continual bailout of AIG basically doing what you had suggested they did with TARP all along? It's strongly suspected that the fed basically keeps buying up toxic assets from banks through AIG. Each time they toss money at AIG, bank sheets magically clear up a bit and insurance is paid off. The dirty sticking point is that we can't see them doing it and Bernake refuses to show where the money is going.

The other thing is that I will still contend to my dying breath that there's no way $700B buys up all the toxic assets out there as the numbers I've seen are closer to $3~5T. And there's no way in hell it should be the government's job to unwind those or absorb those losses. And, after this is all said and done, we need to break out the anti-trust stick on the TBTF banks so we don't end up in this situation again (if someone gets too tied up in this crap, they need to go under and serve as a moral hazard example to others)

SI

I dont know because this isn't being done explicitly. If it is happening as you say than that is a good thing because we have avoided what I saw happening in October and November and Im also of the opinion that had Paulson not torpedoed TARP we would be even better off now that we are (this week of a bear market rally aside). Since TARP was then and it was explicit I have to credit that or else we could go around and around about all sorts of conspiracy theories and hand out credit and blame wherever we see fit for our own purposes.


the 3-5 is due to an overshoot to the downside perhaps so it could be smaller than that PLUS the 700B could be (and probably has been leveraged up) so we could be closer to the middle than you think.

Ok, just curious about your thoughts to those two points. Now back to the regularly scheduled thread ;)

SI

interesting...so the "bad" bank is AIG? sorry , I have to ask.

The huge problem is that Bernake refuses to give any information at all about the money. He had the, ahem, gumption to flat out tell Congress "No" a week or two ago when asked point blank if they would be told where taxpayer money was going.

SI

If that's the case than that is tantamount to good bank/ bad bank which I support.

:rolleyes:

I wonder who started this false info?

That's that tendency to personify banks corporations that I don't think is very helpful. You can't compare banks/corporations with people. People describe Banks/Corporations like they're these giant monsters of conscious thought that we need to punish by hitting them with a whip. They're not going "learn" or feel guilty - they're not people.

I'm against a corporate bailout where the loser company/bank remains as it always was, and gets to stay solvent through taxpayer money. That's stupid for all kinds of reasons. But some kind of bailout can make sense if the taxpayers get a stake, there's many strings attached to the money, any individuals employees of the corporation that committed fraud are gone and in prison, and other employees of the corporation that just sucked are fired and gone. It's not the same "monster" anymore at that point.

EDIT: (For Lack of Reading Skills)

I wasn't talking about you at all. My comment was about Santelli who works for a company that received a rather large bailout. I have no idea what you do for a living or anything else about you.

As for what makes someone a hypocrit, I'd say consistency. If Santelli is against all bailout, that's fine. I completely respect his opinion that government should stay out of private business. I wonder if companies would have been this risky if they knew that the government would not help them out.

What I think makes someone hypocritical is when they have a strong opinion on something like no bailouts, but make exceptions when it involves them. Those who rail against gay people and then start screwing other guys on their own time. Someone who fights to shut down drugs and goes home at night to shoot up. That's a hypocrit to me. If Santelli had taken the same stance on the GE bailout as the others, I would have a ton of respect for him whether I agreed with him or not.

Sorry about that - I've edited my post to remove that part

This whole mess would have been a great opportunity for Fox Business to make a name for themselves. They could have been the anti-establishment network that dug in and found what these guys were doing. The network that called out businesses for overleveraging and so forth. Their "lets paint Obama as the Manchurian candidate" isn't exactly good for a business network.

Of course you are basically assumining that he is for GE's bailout and being against all bailouts isn't enough for you. :rolleyes:

Can we next ask him when he stopped beating his wife?

He has spoken out against every bailout so far. Just wondering why he didn't speak out on the GE one?

Maybe he is against it. Considering as an employee of GE, he has most likely accrued a nice amount of stock options over the years. It's safe to assume that opposing the bailout would be going against his best interests.

I realize the left is trying to engage in Limbaughization of Santrelli, but I hope most people realize how ridiculous that is. Hell, when you are to the left of the Daily Kos on an issue... you should re-evaluate.

I don't really care about left or right, that's your thing. I agree with Santelli on many of his beliefs with the exception of AIG. He's probably my favorite guy on the network because he doesn't bullshit with people (and will give the talking heads on the network a tongue lashing from time to time).

My gripe with him is that if you're going to stick to the belief that all bailouts are bad and that we are helping losers, you should maintain that belief consistently down the line. Conveniently leaving GE out of the anti-bailout rants seems a tad hypocritical.

Or acknowledged.

I think in hindsight TARP will go down as one of the scummiest things down by politicians and businesses in this century. It will take getting out of the confusion and panic and when it is just a topic of historical curiousity before any one else acknowledges that, but I'm pretty sure of it. Much like all the stuff coming out about the sub-prime market and what else right now (because they need to blame something for trillions in losses!).

Whether it was necessary to save the market? I'll admit probably, only because banks, the Fed, and the government, did not have the brainpower, honesty, or effectiveness to implement a real solution (kill what essentially was the mother of all margin squeezes off at the source). If we are living in a society where corruption is the name of the game, that is the tool that is going to be turned to first, regardless of whether it does subsequent damage.

That damage is going to be banks even more in need of anti-trust attacks and regulatory oversight, and most likely those will not occur because everyone will be too busy sighing in relief when a recovery comes. I'm already nervous about how well the lesson is being learned, I can easily see this cycle amplifying and repeating itself again with some other finance gimick as the catalyst. I'd wager on it hitting around 2020 as a ballpark figure.

I think the intentions of TARP were good, but the execution and thought process behind it was flawed. The economy hit a point where no banks were lending at all. Literally hoarding money because they were essentially involvent. If they continued to hoard and not lend, it would have really destoyed this country.

So they panicked and drew up a "bad bank" plan that isn't a bad idea. The problem was that it was poorly presented to the public and put together so fast that details were missed. I also don't think they really knew what was going on with the banks so didn't know how to move forward. It was desperation and ultimately a bad move. But I don't think they were scum for doing it and think their heart was in the right place.

The very notion of the government assuming the worst portions of crazified debt in bulk, with obviously no oversight, is clearly the most mangled attempt at socialism in our history. To me it was pretty clear they were trying to stabilize things in a way where all the rich people were still pretty rich, instead of just stabilizing it. Either wipe out the debt AND any rewards possible from that debt together, government assumes both, which is still nasty but at least bullshitably valid and 'fair'. Or guarantee the banks and their liabilities, but wipe out their shareholders either entirely or with large government 'paper ownership' of the banks.

If TARP did exactly what it was created and intended to do, it already WAS the most crooked, scummy, thing you could imagine. It might as well have been called welfare for bad banks. That is just if it was exactly as advertised, the whole plan does not pass the common sense test. That it was corrupted and turned into an outright handout was an obvious second step, once they saw they could put out pure garbage in plain sight and be called heroes for it, they realized they could go all out.

What resulted is the market did JUST WHAT I DESCRIBED. It wiped out 90% plus of the shareholder equity in those banks. The rewards from those toxic assets which the banks were trying to game so hard to retain while offloading the debt, evaporated anyway, as everything had to be marked to zero anyway after the foreclosure sponsored margin call accelerated.

We are in the same boat we would have been in if government money was more carefully targeted or we viciously beat the shit out of the bank leadership, the only difference is we spent billions (well a couple trillion at least) in order for a few millions of dollars to be redistributed to various players.

The simple thought is going to be, well there was a real crisis of liquidity, something needed to be done, and sadly it is correct, it will blind people for a decade or so until they go back, study it, and realize that we spent many times more than we had to, and for very shady reasons. It will take that much time probably before people can separate out 'panic, something must be done, it was done, it was the right thing' from 'panic, something must be done, but all we truly did was something, and it was not the right thing'. Right now whenever I bring it up with people I always get labeled as some form of inaction-advocate, when my position is actually take more energetic and deep action than funding the finance industry's latest force-fed plan.

I agree with the general thoughts of the post, but I do have one quibble. I fail to see how this is socialist in the least. Socialism would be letting the banks fail and giving the money to the people. This was/is the gross extreme of capitalism- take money from everyone and give it to the rich, with the government as an intermediary.

I really, really hope there is an attempt to completely revamp regulations as there was in the 30s. I mean, hell, a lot of why we are here is because we started rolling back a lot of those regulations in the name of more profit. But I'm worried it's the easiest time to have interests dictate government policy in our history and our government will be too stupid and self absorbed to do what is right.

SI

Thats why I called it mangled socialism, its socialism for the socialites! There is a real notion of entitlement and mutual backscratching in our nation's elite, they probably think it is the pinacle of capitalism, but anyone who has studied enough history can see it is the standard pooling of power at the top to keep alive one standard of living while assuming the great mass of people are some form of peasants. It starts to resemble fuedalism after a point if you ask me.

It is very much how socialism truly worked out. You have a party elite that enjoy vast power and perks, and a whole lot of other people that are simply means to that end. Occaisonally the masses do well, if the overall situation is naturally in a good state, but they basically are left to the ravages of economic change. They also tend to be used as a buffer to damage of the elite, cuts come first among the great crowd until there is nothing left to cut and the elites need to give up things.

We are not quite there, but the trends are not encouraging. There seems to be an entire class of high powered financial actors that see various large pools of consumer money as something that is to be harnessed and extracted, rather than truly invested. They need the massive wealth generation of the country to keep enjoying the priveleges they have acquired, but at the same time they are killing the engines of that wealth generation so they feel in control of the top of the pyramid. That is not how capitalism works, it is a process of creative cooperation and destruction, where unnatural barriers and extraction of wealth are pure inefficiency. Unchecked you can grind the machine to a halt, trying to hard to control or to game it makes the entire engine inoperable. This is the moral hazard when we start supporting institutions 'too big to fail', or get credit crunches because the mass leveraging and gambling has gone beyond the thresholds probability can sustain. You can bet one loan will not fail, and survive probably 95% of the time, you can not bet 35 loans will not fail and survive more than 5% of the time.

Simple question: how is that not the endgame of capitalism? How is that "not how capitalism works"? How is erecting scary entry barriers by oligopolies not the true endgame of capitalism?

Also, it's scary how many times I have used the term feudalism in the last 6 months, too :(

(Maybe it's time to finally polish off that economy thread I've been wanting to post for a few months- it's more open ended theory questions than anything and I think you'd enjoy answering some of them. :) )

SI

Big governmnent and big business are both bad. Where does that leave me?

It is not the end game of capitalism, it is the end of capitalism! Capitalism assumes that competitive and cooperative forces are free to act. That freedom is under attack every time the government supports oligopolies with subsidies, favored laws, and lax enforcement of laws.

I mean, if you follow the Deep Capture storyline, didn't one part even mention that the tendency for SEC investigations to occur on 'targets' of the shorters. Meanwhile there are numerous stories of the SEC/government ignoring companies breaking laws, such as with Madoff, or Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac (which were protected by no less than Congress).

Capitalism does not PREVENT people setting up little board room fiefdoms and running their companies into the ground. In some ways once you have enough muscle you can keep that going for a while. However, capitalism doesn't encourage that outcome either... if we were rational actors we would want to know where our investment dollars are going and that they are being spent effectively, and the investor class would boot out this generation of CEOs that are snivelling incompetents. Unfortunately, they own the majority shares (that whole wealth concentration in the top percentage point has its downsides) and consequently the decisions made are to support their agendas more often then advancing a company.

If capitalism is working properly, those companies running a bloated mess for the golden parachute generation of CEOS would be beat out by hungry efficient companies that swoop in with less debt, less fat, and more ideas. Unfortunately consumer loyalty and established market presence is bad enough for a new face (even one doing an exemplary job with a better product at lower price)... but now the government has proven its loyalties lie with this aristocracy as well. We are seeing massive subsidies with no strings attached (otherwise we might vote in a change at these businesses), the attackers that might push reform from within the private sector (new businesses) will not even get in the door most likely.

The good news is that generally we have enough new entrants in various sectors to keep the overall economy heading in the right direction. But the trends are towards stagnation in many core areas, in some cases you see outright stalling or even attacks on progressive business ideas (for instance the resistance to pollution controls, lack of alternative energy businesses although many basic technologies have been on the brink for years, a car industry with a thumb stuck up its ass after years of wasting cash and being insanely conservative). We need some of these big boys that can't hack it anymore to get out of the way, but no one seems to think you can start businesses anymore unless its in some niche area or random tech.

Anyhoo, simplify it, capitalism when it is working should lead to diverse and often changing companies in the market. It does not naturally tend to oligopolies, although you'll find some economists out there who probably publish as such. The more energy is spent towards maintaining some random power structure at the top of business, the less benefits and good solutions will come out of the capitalism process. I liken it to being a third world dictator, you can increase your stay in power by killing anyone with half a brain who could potentially threaten it, unfortunately you are killing the people most likely to improve your nation. Sheep are good for maintaining rule, but not maintaining growth! I consider bailouts as likely killing off chances that good banks/businesses would grab market share from the reckless players... so we'll continue to see reckless play and further damage.