Absolutely.   All we've done is taught people and companies that amoral spending and policy is inconsequential.  That Big Brother will be there to put on the band aid.

When my kids ride a bike, fall and scrape their knee I encourage them learn to ride better and use knee protection.   This country has become a little kid with short term memory loss and no economic moral barometer and is skinning their knees every day and asking Uncle Sam to kiss the boo boo and make it better.  It's pathetic.

"Too big to fail" is exactly what those banks and the government want you to think.    Let those banks fail, throw their presidents in prison, let banks that didn't fail buy up the mortgages from the failed banks and let the market heal itself in a year or two instead of a decade or two or with a continually overinflated bubble.

How about an ACORN lawsuit Obama was involved in against Citibank back in '94?  The complaint was about alleged red-lining...unfortunately red-lining has been warped and is now more or less code for "refusing to give loans to people who can't afford them".  Red-lining became the bludgeon in what ACORN saw as a great way to get poor folks in bad neighborhoods (that a lot of ACORN workers are from) into houses for "FREE!".  Of course we both know they aren't actually free...ACORN probably did too honestly...

In any case it was groups like ACORN, with lawyers like Obama, under tortured or abused legislation (like the CRA revisions pushed by ACORN from 95 that would come later) that was used to push this stuff.

Actually there is a quote from Janet Reno around this time about how it is unacceptable for banks to base their lending practices on the financial status of their customers....I'm only slightly paraphrasing that sadly.

The real question is how prevalent this practice was, which I don't know but the indications I've seen make me think it was significant.  In any case banks were absolutely forced to give bad loans in some cases.   Most of the time though, particularly after the CRA revisions, the banks were content to go along with it because the revisions set it up so that GSEs like Fannie and Freddie would buy the loan from the bank and the bank would be more or less off the hook...so they stopped fighting it since it wasn't their dime anymore.  So we could technically still pin this on banking greed because they chose not to risk themselves to say no to it...those greedy bastards!

PS - All of this info came out before the election even, so its no surprise most won't have heard of it =P

@thread,

I've been hearing that numbers for the tea parties will be coming out today that put the number of attendees in the 1 to 1.2 million range.  I have no idea how they intend to explain the massive jump from the 300 to 500k numbers that came out originally (I'm ignoring the 200k and 600k estimates as most came from groups with an interest to swell or shrink the numbers, and Averages are generally more reliable in this issues).  They are saying 856 events with 300ish having good solid counts and the rest being estimates.  Should be amusing to watch folks fight over the final number. 

Regardless it is pretty obvious the movement isn't going anywhere though, they've already started to plan for 4th of July events. In a change of pace though they aren't doing it as a protest but more of a picnic from what I've heard...their tentative slogan is something along the lines of "Declaring Independance from both political parties" or something to that effect.  I seriously doubt it will detour most news outletts from using the fringes of the group to paint them all as nutjubs and Fox will probably devote another day of coverage with a week's leadup of adverts.  I just get a kick out of it when I see people buy into some of the completely made up BS that gets thrown out there for people to soak up, from both sides.

As another relevant note, the DHS document that came out before tax day appears not to have been a coincidense in timing.  Civil-liberties lawyers at HLS flagged some of the language in the report but it was ignored and pushed out the door (according to HLS spokeman Amy Kudwa)....so either they were rushing and ignoring warnings because they're incompetent or they had an agenda and a reason to push...I'm sure you guys can think of a few reasons why the administration might do that...but I'm just as likely to believe incompetence since it would certainly fit the trend (ie Obama's hard time with nominations thus far).

I imagine it must be pretty easy to post a profit when you get a big fat check from the Government...

Yeah ...

A lot of people don't understand that (potentially with governmental support) Bankrupcy courts could have dealt with these problems fairly well, and it probably would have been healthier result in the long run. The second a bank (like Citibank) "Failed" it would enter Chapter 7 bankrupcy and its assets would be sold off at competitive rates in order to pay off the liabilities ... For the most part these banks were very healthy so most of the divisions would be bought by healthy well managed companies who want to develop or expand their involvement in banking, and even the toxic assets would be (quickly) bought because they would be discounted to a level where investors would see the potential-return worth the risk of the investment.

It's truly frightening how much we agree sometimes...although I rarely post to say it....

I remember back when we used to be accused of being the same person...sometimes I wonder myself =P

Not to mention that the Banks weren't going out of business because of lack of profits ...

What (some) people don't seem to understand is that the Banks that needed to fail is that these banks balance sheets are (essentially) like a speculator who bought a home for $100,000, put $200,000 of work into the home, and when the home didn't sell at his $1,000,000 asking price he wrote down the value of the home to $500,000 because "it has to be worth that much" ... This speculator may still have a job, and be earning $4,000 per month, but he owns a second home that has $300,000 worth in debt associated with it and is probably worth (less than) $100,000.

And for some stupid reason the government wants this kind of action to continue.

BTW - pro-spend-spend-spend-like-there's-no-tomorrow Republicans are no more safe from the tea party ire than dems with similar views...

He is being booed for his vote on TARP if you didn't catch it...

So I have a hard time buying the narrative being pushed that these people were by in large somehow OK with the fiscal stupidity under bush...or that they were somehow silent under bush...I think it is a whole hell of a lot more likely that they are just now finding their vioce as a movement and that they were outraged the whole damn time...it's easy to figure out with graphs like the one Kasz posted why people are just now getting upset enough to organize over it.

The biggest surprise to me from this whole affair hasn't been how the folks were treated...but rather how many on the left actually believe Olby, Gorofolo, etc... when they paint this group of ~400k people as "just a bunch of racist rednecks" based on a few cherry picked interviews that are supposed to represent all of them. 

I wonder what narrative could have been written about the million man march had a similar effort been taken up there.  Would we have seen headlines of "Million homeless people gather at capital to complain about black people."...it would certainly fit the "mischaracterize the people and their views" MO of this disinformation campaign (note I don't give fox a pass on their propaganda campaign either for the parties...but they also weren't resorting to childish insults which to me is far worse).

Ask Herbert Hoover how well leaving the banks alone worked out.

There is a reason why banks have several extra layers of protection that other areas of the economy don't. People flip out when they feel like their money isn't safe. Why do you think you saw a several thousand point drop in the stock market in the days that followed the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy? If you truly believe the market could have handled 5-10 simultaneous bankruptcies on that scale in the financial sector, you need to have your head examined. Lehman Brothers was the largest bankruptcy in this country's history and single-handedly brought the market down to its knees.

Even Bush and Cheney knew that letting things play themselves out was unacceptable in terms of how catastrophic the consequences would be otherwise.

And I find it ironic that you guys blame the government for causing this crisis but then blame the government for stepping in to fix it. You say that the government is responsible for these banks making these loans but then turn around and say that the banks should take responsibility for what they have done.

Uh, no.  We're calling for the banks to go bankrupt and for their presidents and CEO's to go to prison.  How is that not considering them responsible?

What's wrong with a few thousand point drop on Wall Street?  Better that with a steady market based recovery than a false market inflated by the government that will soon destroy the remaining value of the dollar.  If you want that kind of tax, good for you. 

Do you want to keep priting fiat money?  Do you want to keep borrowing from the Chinese? Do you want to see the end results of both?  You think a few major banks going bankrupt is bad?  You haven't seen nothing until see the effects of hyper inflation or a country like China calling in their loans which the government would have to sell off national assets to pay down.