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Tell me again how Government Caused the Depression of 2008

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  • Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as their Democrat enablers are soley responsible for the current economic crisis. As soon as I can figure out how they also managed to tank the economies of Iceland, Greece, Spain, Ireland and the UK, I'm home free.
    • Soros

    • by tqft ( 619476 )

      "...how they also managed to tank the economies of Iceland,..."
      The arbitrage available from dealing Fannie & Freddie allowed evil international banks to manipulate gov bond markets in the GUPpIES. Borrow from Fed, buy Freddie/Fannie, use Freddie/Fannie as collateral for dealing in speculative positions in GuPpIES debt.

      Almost sounds plausible.

    • Well, there's also the deregulation part- you know, where the guys we elected to protect us from this mess looked the other way?

  • Government deregulated, and loosed enforcement of regulation remaining, and that allowed this all to happen. That's about the extent of Government involvement in the matter.

    Yes, it was massive fraud on the industry's part and they deserve the full blame for the economic collapse. Murderers don't get a free ticket because the police failed to stop them.

  • Government is corrupt. government is rife with crony insiders from wall street and the casino banks who rotate in and out of government and are in the positions of ultimate economic authority, including at the Fed. All policies come from there. They also lobby/bribe off other government employees..politicians and 'regulators", to look the other way or to sponsor new legislation or remove old legislation that gets in the way of their skimming con games.

    Government is 100% at fault, being so corrupt. Corporati

    • If corporations are "corrupt by design", what in the Constitution gives Government the right to form them to begin with?

      And, with "government lack of oversight" in the above- does that mean even you think *deregulation and smaller government* is a part of the problem, rather than the solution? As in, we need fewer crony capitalists in Washington DC and more disciplinary policemen?

      • The Z man is right, but left out one crucial point, which left the door open to the questions in your second paragraph: Govt. is "corrupt by nature".

        And to address specifically what you wrote in your JE, it's neither one of those solely, so you're setting up a false choice.

        You should try to stop yourself from thinking about things in "either x or y" terms, as most things in life aren't that simple. Sometimes it's "x and y and several other things", and sometimes it's "neither are any good".

      • If corporations are "corrupt by design", what in the Constitution gives Government the right to form them to begin with?

        The same thing in the Constitution that gives the Supreme Court to invalidate laws as unconsistutional... namely, Common Law tradition.

        • When we find a bug in a software system, we eliminate it. When we find a bug in the economic system, we perpetuate it out of Common Law Tradition?

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by snowgirl ( 978879 )

            When we find a bug in a software system, we eliminate it. When we find a bug in the economic system, we perpetuate it out of Common Law Tradition?

            Sometimes when a bug is found, you find that a bunch of software written towards your software would break if you actually fix it.

            For awhile, glibc would check the file pointer passed to it by the f* file operations (fopen, fread, fwrite, fclose), and if it were null, it would then simply return early. Later, glibc to save speed on these oft-called routines decided to drop this validation. After all, the behavior of passing in NULL for the file pointer is undefined. This broke a lot of software that just

            • Actually, a very reasonable and time-tested alternative does exist- and worked in Europe for several thousand years before kings started granting charters to corporations or enforcing contract law. A similar system actually worked in North America right up until the time white men came.

  • Glass Steagall of '33 was designed to prevent massive fraud from investment corps on Wall Street from taking down banks on Main Street by creating a barrier between the two. GLBA of '99 removed Glass Steagall. This would never have happened in this manner if Glass Steagall was still in place.

    Further, free money as provided by the Fed, created this problem. Free money exasperates problems in the economy. There should be a cost to risk, otherwise too many people will take risks, as there is no cost.

    Additi

It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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