Written with sad irony.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at September 25, 2008 08:23 PM | Email ThisWould someone please tell the King Count Assessor's Office about this? I just got my property assessment and it is at least 10% above what I could realistically sell my place for today. It's time for a property tax revolt.
Posted by: BananaLand on September 25, 2008 08:28 PMWell I guess they got the last laugh.
Posted by: Bill K. on September 25, 2008 08:38 PMOr do we all just take a deep breath and adopt 'wait and see'?
Posted by: Ragnar Danneskjold on September 25, 2008 09:10 PMWaMu, on the front line of subprime "virtual" mortgages, mandated for the people by D Congress.
Posted by: Mom on September 25, 2008 09:11 PMBurning Down The House: What Caused Our Economic Crisis?
Posted by: Ragnar Danneskjold on September 26, 2008 12:02 AMI saw this coming a while ago, so I've opened a BECU account, but I did not pull my money out of WAMU. I probably will in the next couple months though, since WAMU is no longer a local bank. Ragnar, I have had a very good experience with BECU so far, and they are giving 7.25% on the first $500 in checking or savings accounts. That's something I never got with WAMU (maybe I should have switched a while ago).
Posted by: Palouse on September 26, 2008 07:35 AM
After listening to absolute morons go on and on this morning on the Sounder regarding how the "government under GWB seized WAMU's $200,000,000,000 in deposits and sold them to their friends for $1.9 billion to their friends) i realize that it is hopeless, I live amongst utter and complete failuire to educate ones self. Look, deposits are not assets to a bank, they are liabilities the bank owes to it's depositers. Anyway the video link above does as good a job of explaining how we got here as anything I can think of.
Posted by: JDH on September 26, 2008 08:31 AMThe CRA created sub-prime lending and bloated real estate prices to the point where only the very wealthy truly would qualify for a loan under the parameters we all lived under 25 years ago.
From the National Review:
"Much more problematic than Gramm-Leach-Bliley is the Community Reinvestment Act, a bit of legislative arm-twisting much beloved by Sen. Obama and his fellow Democrats. One of the reasons so many bad mortgage loans were made in the first place is that Barack Obama's celebrated community organizers make their careers out of forcing banks to do so. ACORN, for which Obama worked, is one of many left-wing organizations that spent decades pressuring banks and bank regulators to do more to make mortgages available to people without much in the way of income, assets, or credit. These campaigns often were couched in racially inflammatory terms. The result was the Community Reinvestment Act. The CRA empowers the FDIC and other banking regulators to punish those banks which do not lend to the poor and minorities at the level that Obama's fellow community organizers would like. Among other things, mergers and acquisitions can be blocked if CRA inquisitors are not satisfied that their demands -- which are political demands -- have been met. There is a name for loans made to people who do not have the credit, assets, income, or down payment to qualify for a normal mortgage: subprime.
The bankers cannot blame CRA entirely; they made a lot of bad bets on rising home prices. But CRA did influence lending standards across the banking industry, even in those institutions that are not strictly liable to its jurisdiction. The subprime debacle is in no trivial part the result of lending decisions in which political extortion trumped businesses' normal bottom-line concerns.
Along with these bad loans, the underlying problem is that there was a bubble in the price of housing -- a bubble caused in no small part by politics, in the form of an easy-money/easy-credit policy from the Fed.
It was politics, too, that created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, enabled them to dominate the mortgage market, and implicitly took upon American taxpayers the risks of those business while the rewards were enjoyed, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, by largely Democratic political opportunists, who then gave generously to Democrats, the top recipients of their largesse being: Chris Dodd, Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama. And it was politics that unwisely nationalized Fannie and Freddie without resolving the underlying moral hazard -- private profit, public risk -- that makes those institutions problematic. From this Senator Obama takes away the lesson that there has been a failure of the market, and that what is needed is more politics. In this analysis Obama is as wrong as it is possible to be.
The only reason there are returns on investments is that there is risk involved. Obama talks as though the government can create new regulations that will remove risk from the markets. It cannot. Investors sometimes make bad decisions. Businesses sometimes borrow too much money. "Some of these investment banks look like hedge funds, they're so leveraged," says one longtime Wall Street hand. But the markets are addressing that problem, too, in their own brutally Darwinian way: That's why Bank of America is acquiring Merrill Lynch on the cheap."
The old-fashioned "family values" that the left is so so fond of mocking would go a long ways towards rebuilding "areas of social and economic decay".
The school drop-out rate is astronomical. Instead of decent parental role models inner city kids have gun waving sexist hip-hop thugs that are beloved and revered by the left.
And the answer was to force businesses into bankruptcy by playing the race card?
Lets face it, leftists shouldn't be in charge of anything.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,428641,00.html
Posted by: scott on September 26, 2008 12:33 PMThere is only ONE bank the federal government should take over - The Federal Reserve Bank.
Clean house. Issue US Treasury currency. Remove all of the Federal Reserve [Debt] Notes (our current currency). Set basic targets for growth in money supply (that is, US Treasury Notes) that is tied to long term economic growth.
Posted by: BananaLand on September 26, 2008 12:34 PMIt's all enough to make a person sick.
Posted by: Bill Cruchon on September 26, 2008 12:39 PMIt's none of my business, just as it it is nobody elses business if someone chooses not to do business with me based upon THEIR assessment of my ability to pay based upon my credit history, my ability to repay, the condition of the collateral, the appraised value of the collateral etc.
Posted by: JDH on September 26, 2008 01:12 PMYeah, there ought to be truant officers forcing 13-years olds to attend school. What in the world is wrong with that? Oh I know, having children actually getting an education threatens your socialist dream of an endless stream of pathetic people who depend on the government. Truth be told, leftists love it when children are born out of wedlock and drop out of school.
Heck yeah, lets force banks to loan them money to buy a house they neither qualify for or will ever be able to pay off. And then we'll watch housing values rocket out of sight as a result so even decent hard working people can't afford a house in liberal bastions like Seattle. You morons.
All of what I say is undoubtedly lost on you.
Posted by: Bill Cruchon on September 26, 2008 02:25 PM