BuddyGroom wrote:

Mountainphan wrote:

seke2 wrote:i'd rather have a president who will surround himself with smart people and take the time to think about/discuss important decisions rather than someone who will surround himself with grossly unqualified morons and make decisions on a whim.

You mean like former execs at Fannie Mae, Joe Biden, Samantha Power, Joseph Cirincione, Zbigniew Brzezinski, et al?

I don't know who Joseph Cirincione or Samantha Power are, but I think it's quite a reach to categorize Biden or Brzezinski as "grossly unqualified morons."

Woody wrote:I watched some clips on CNN over lunch.

People are saying McCain stayed quiet during the whole meeting that he suspended his campaign to attend in order lead us out of this mess. And when he did speak, at the very end, he didn't really say anything to indicate to anyone in the room where he stood.

Assuming the above is true, what do the Republicans on the board think about that? I'm honestly asking, I'm not taking a shot at him. Obama very well may have done the same

jerseyhoya wrote:I think McCain is partially to blame, and not for showing up, but because he hasn't taken a position other than "we should all get together, negotiate, and pass something."

Except Senate Republicans aren't running away from the deal, by and large

While prices of most stocks are no mystery, these troubled investments are not traded on any exchange. The market for them is opaque: Traders do business over the telephone, and days can go by without a single trade.

Not only that, many of these instruments are extremely complex. Consider the Bear Stearns Alt-A Trust 2006-7, a $1.3 billion drop in the sea of risky loans. Here's how it worked:

As the credit bubble grew in 2006, Bear Stearns, then one of the leading mortgage traders on Wall Street, bought 2,871 mortgages from lenders like the Countrywide Financial.

The mortgages, with an average size of about $450,000, were Alt-A loans - the kind sometimes referred to as "liar loans" because lenders made them without the usual documentation to verify borrowers' incomes or savings. Nearly 60 percent of the loans were made in California, Florida and Arizona, where home prices rose - and subsequently fell - faster than almost anywhere else in the United States.

Bear Stearns bundled the loans into 37 different kinds of bonds, ranked by varying levels of risk, for sale to investment banks, hedge funds and insurance companies. If any of the mortgages went bad - and, it turned out, many did - the bonds at the bottom of the pecking order would suffer losses first, followed by the next lowest, and so on up the chain. By one measure, the Bear Stearns Alt-A Trust 2006-7 has performed well: It has suffered losses of about 1.6 percent. Of those loans, 778 have been paid off or moved through the foreclosure process.

But by many other measures, it's a toxic portfolio. Of the 2,093 loans that remain, 23 percent are delinquent or in foreclosure, according to Bloomberg News data. Initially rated AAA, the most senior of the securities were downgraded to near junk bond status last week. Valuing mortgage bonds, even the safest variety, requires guesstimates: How many homeowners will fall behind on their mortgages? If the bank forecloses, what will the homes sell for? Investments like the Bear Stearns securities are almost certain to lose value as long as home prices keep falling.

A big challenge for Treasury officials will be deciding whether to buy the troubled investments near the values at which the banks hold them on their books. That would help minimize losses for financial institutions. Driving a hard bargain, however, would protect taxpayers.

"Many are tempted by a strategy of trying to do both things at once," said Lawrence Summers, a Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. As a hypothetical example, Summers suggested that an institution could have securities on its books at $60, but the current market price might only be $30. In that case, the government might be tempted to come in at about $55.

Many financial institutions are so weak that they must sell their troubled assets at prices near the value on their books, said Carlos Mendez, a senior managing director at ICP Capital, an investment firm that specializes in credit markets. Anything less would eat into their capital.

"Depending on your perspective on the economy, foreclosure rates and home prices, the market may eventually reflect that price," he said. "But most buyers are not willing to make that bet right now. And that's why we have these low prices."

Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, told Congress on Tuesday that the government should avoid paying a "fire sale" price and instead pay what he called the "hold-to-maturity price," or the price that investors would bid if they expected to keep the bond till it was paid off.

Mountainphan wrote:

seke2 wrote:yes, it's way better than the alterative

i hate bush, but i respect that he's generally surrounded himself with smart people. i don't agree with their policies, but i generally feel that they are at least intelligent.

with mccain, i don't even have faith that he'd be surrounded by smart people (based on the choices he has made as a candidate) or be intelligent enough to listen to those people (based on his often seeming to act brashly and irrationally as a candidate).

Based on which choices?

Mountainphan wrote:

seke2 wrote:yes, it's way better than the alterative

i hate bush, but i respect that he's generally surrounded himself with smart people. i don't agree with their policies, but i generally feel that they are at least intelligent.

with mccain, i don't even have faith that he'd be surrounded by smart people (based on the choices he has made as a candidate) or be intelligent enough to listen to those people (based on his often seeming to act brashly and irrationally as a candidate).

Based on which choices?

Mountainphan wrote:

BuddyGroom wrote:

Mountainphan wrote:

seke2 wrote:i'd rather have a president who will surround himself with smart people and take the time to think about/discuss important decisions rather than someone who will surround himself with grossly unqualified morons and make decisions on a whim.

You mean like former execs at Fannie Mae, Joe Biden, Samantha Power, Joseph Cirincione, Zbigniew Brzezinski, et al?

I don't know who Joseph Cirincione or Samantha Power are, but I think it's quite a reach to categorize Biden or Brzezinski as "grossly unqualified morons."

Fine, how about highly qualified morons?

The end result is the same.

Woody wrote:Recently I've been reconsidering Ron Paul's thoughts on fiat currency

Mountainphan wrote:[Fine, how about highly qualified morons?

The end result is the same.

seke2 wrote:

Mountainphan wrote:

seke2 wrote:yes, it's way better than the alterative

i hate bush, but i respect that he's generally surrounded himself with smart people. i don't agree with their policies, but i generally feel that they are at least intelligent.

with mccain, i don't even have faith that he'd be surrounded by smart people (based on the choices he has made as a candidate) or be intelligent enough to listen to those people (based on his often seeming to act brashly and irrationally as a candidate).

Based on which choices?

Mostly, selecting Sarah Palin, who I feel has proven that she is phenomenally unqualified to be 1 heartbeat away from the presidency.

Otherwise, stuff like this debate stunt--I'm sorry, but Obama is right. The President better be able to do 2 things at once. And it doesn't sound or seem like McCain's presence improved or resolved the issues. And then despite all of his hot air about not leaving Washington until the issues were resolved, he ends up going to the debates anyway?

Also stuff like his knee-jerk reaction to the Georgia-Russia situation. It's not even about whether he was right or wrong, it was how quickly and decisively he weighed in. That's not necessarily a good thing, he didn't even allow a chance for all the information about the volatile situation to be known before he took a stand that it would be very difficult to move away from.

Just a few examples anyway. Like a lot of other people who had respect for McCain in years past, I have really lost all of that respect during this campaign cycle.

[W]hat disappoints me about the McCain campaign is it has no central argument. I had hoped that he would create a grand narrative explaining how the United States is fundamentally unprepared for the 21st century and how McCain’s worldview is different.

McCain has not made that sort of all-encompassing argument, so his proposals don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts. Without a groundbreaking argument about why he is different, he’s had to rely on tactical gimmicks to stay afloat. He has no frame to organize his response when financial and other crises pop up.

He has no overarching argument in part because of his Senate training and the tendency to take issues on one at a time — in part, because of the foolish decision to run a traditional right-left campaign against Obama and, in part, because McCain has never really resolved the contradiction between the Barry Goldwater and Teddy Roosevelt sides of his worldview. One day he’s a small-government Western conservative; the next he’s a Bull Moose progressive. The two don’t add up — as we’ve seen in his uneven reaction to the financial crisis.

dajafi wrote:But I'll instead put on my mod hat and ask everyone to refrain from this kind of "nyah nyah, your side's idiots are more idiotic than our side's idiots." You're all smart guys. Just argue your side.

FTN wrote:

dajafi wrote:But I'll instead put on my mod hat and ask everyone to refrain from this kind of "nyah nyah, your side's idiots are more idiotic than our side's idiots." You're all smart guys. Just argue your side.

this one?

Bakestar wrote:
Of course, I was the one in 2000 who was naive enough to think Bush and the Republicans would recognize the closeness of the election and the splits in Congress, and see the imperative in forming something akin to a coalition government. Whoopie-daisy me!