I only watched perhaps 4 minutes of this video but the narrative was obvious enough. The world fell apart because of free-wheeling capitalism, look-the-other-way regulators, elegant politicians, and the inevitable logic of laissez-faire which enriches the few and impoverishes the many. It’s the same old confused proto-Marxist model. What would these people have us to to do? Give more power to the police state to regulate the economy. They would deny it but that’s really all they favor in the end.
At least, that is my quick impression. This is the fake version of Meltdown in contrast to the still-important book by Thomas Woods, which remains the definitive account to 2008 and its aftermath. Thank goodness he wrote it when he did!
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Jeffrey – I had exactly the same reaction – I don’t think you missed anything by only watching the first 4 minutes. There is no truth in the news because there is no news in the truth.
As Michael Milken wrote in his review of “Den of Thieves”. As with all fairy tales, it starts with “Once upon a time” and most of the rest is pure fiction.
You get the same bias in “Enron – the Smartest Guys in the Room”.
The usual canard is that what was going on was a scam, motivated entirely by greed, that it was obvious to anyone that what was going on was fraudulent, and that a lack of regulation, or deregulation allowed the scam to go on unchecked.
The way Wall St works is that every decade or so a new boatload of regulations is instituted, and the traders on Wall St immediately invent ways to evade the rules and find even more complicated and ingenious ways to rip off the public and line their own pockets. If the makers of this film actually cared what happens to the public then they would seek to give the public more ways to prevent their money from finding its way into Wall St, by breaking the power of the federal government over money and finance. Enhancing the power of government has the opposite effect to what they claim they want.
Reverse that; Wall Street helps write the regulations in order to stifle competition and benefit themselves already knowing how they are going to get around them.
There really is no Wall Street anymore. When the big firms realized they we going belly up, Mr. Hanky allowed them to change their charter so that the became banks, allowing the Federal Reserve to bail them out. Merrill Lynch became part of BofA. Goldman Sachs was indirectly bailed out by bailing out AIG.
The idea that regulators could have prevented the mortgage meltdown, is rubbished by the fact that Fannie and Freddie bought (Jumbo) mortgage backs (that they had not originated) and as a result went belly up. Where would these Einsteinian regulators come from if not from Fannie and Freddie. They may as well have surfed pornography on the internet, like the SEC regulators.
The reason they bought these securities in the first place was that they were using the same flawed default model as the rating agencies.
-5% annual increase in house prices.
-default rates for ARMs would be the same as historic rates (where the ARM rate at the end of 5 years was always lower than the original ARM rate – this model did not work in a rising interest rate environment).
Henry – good observations.
I would add that the big banks (now) lobby for regulations that make it prohibitively expensive for small term to comply, thus creating a huge barrier to entry.
The next meltdown in US banks will come when the inevitable collapse occurs in Europe and the “domino effect” ensues as large European banks go belly up. It is going to be a lot more difficult this time around for Ben Bernanke to bail out European banks that are counter parties to large US banks.
And look at part three. Union thugs “claiming their rights”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JBhAvUTW5ZE
“In France, a union leader oversees the kidnapping of his bosses.”
Wow, I guess that is “workers rights!”
Sort of like “Inside Job.” It promises to reveal the culprits, yet it has Rep. Barney Frank’s photo on the box. In the film he is purportedly a quoted expert on what happened. However, in real life he was a participant and instigator of the mess.
Don’t get me wrong, like Jeff, I can tolerate other options and ideas, but this had a picture of Barney Frank on it. It would be like a film trying to get to the bottom of ObamaCare having Pelosi as an on film and commenting expert on how this bad thing happened. There goes all credibility.
On last thing; we should never forget that without created/printed money and low interest rates by the FedRes we wouldn’t have had a bubble in the first place.
Is there a libertarian version of the so-called meltdown, sharply produced a la _Frontline_, on a major network, and which identifies the root cause, the faulty semantics of present day culture, and the continued trend of more government control of “everyman’s” life?
Is this sarcasm or a genuine question? If it’s the latter, I would go with probably not.
Fed plans to spy on critical bloggers
One of the commenters added this to the above linked article:
Seconded!
“Fed plans to spy on critical bloggers”.
They will bring down our server? They are probably not sophisticated enough to plant a worm or a denial of service.
Sophistication doesn’t matter anymore. There are plenty of websites you can go to and buy your own hacking tools. Instead of having to write the code and know what something actually does, they can just keep trying different clicks of the mouse button until something works.
Is it time to bring back the Kulak?
http://pigilito.blogspot.com/2009/02/is-it-time-to-bring-back-kulak.html
Are we going to labeled Austrian Kulak wreckers?
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