Flutterby™! : status update 2010-09-24 22:17:00.439226+00

status update

2010-09-24 22:17:00.439226+00 by Dan Lyke 7 comments

Irate at this "nobody saw the crash coming" narrative. Bullshit artists rewriting history to try to maintain undeserved credibility.

#Comment Re: made: 2010-09-30 10:20:12.843226+00 by: jeff [edit history]

@Andy: You were very smart not becoming an early adopter/casualty to this disingenuous practice by the banks!

Hopefully prospective homeowners have now learned something from the ARMs race. Sadly, fully 1/4 homes sale now are foreclosure sales.

As for our government not knowing whether an attack such as 9/11 was possible (either from within or from abroad), I'll leave that as an exercise to folks who's understanding of reality isn't limited by the American Idol.

Apropos "nobody saw this coming" -- I recall Condoleza Rice saying, in 2001, of the attacks on NYWTC, the Pentagon and a PA farm field that there was no way of imagining that terrorists would crash planes into buildings. Air France flt 8969 was hijacked in December of 1994, by the Armed Islamic Group, who intended to crash it into Paris. Even I remembered that!! Of course, the Press Secretary of that era had never heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so ...

@Jeff: to support your assessment of ARMs - Back in 1980 I bought a house and faced the decision: conventional @ 15% or ARM-6 month @ 12%. Facing some household opposition, I nonetheless took the conventional. In 6 months, the ARM jumped to 21% and I never looked back after that. ARMs were, are and continue to be lousy deals for the borrower.

Representatives in our "government" and within "the Fed" and the banking institutions driving Wall Street all have a very close and special relationship amongst themselves. (It's called a "brotherhood.")

Many of them knew exactly what was going on, what was going to happen, and how to exploit it using the American homeowner and taxpayer.

And just about anyone with common sense could see that ARMs were not a scalable or sustainable concept.

Yeah, what pisses me off the most, and what triggered that screed, was Greenspan saying that the Fed's projections of the economy as if the housing bubble was going to continue was reasonable, that, in fact, nobody saw that it was going to burst. I then went back on this very blog and found all sorts of non-experts pointing out how unsustainable it was.

But it's not like there weren't people pointing and laughing. Saying that it knowing when it was going to end, and profiting thereby, was difficult is totally legit. But pretending that those who didn't see it at all should somehow get a free pass to continue to work in the field is just beyond chutzpah.

And with more than three out of every four trades being done algorithmically and the Fed actually buying securities it's not even really a true market anymore.

#Comment Re: The Calculus of "Crashes" made: 2010-09-25 12:47:30.079226+00 by: jeff

Ironically, the stock market uptick rule was rescinded almost to the very day that that housing bubble burst. Think the bankers and Wall Street didn't know what was going to happen? Think again.