Was Iceland a Target for Economic Hit Men? - John Perkins

[grassfed]

Run time: 02:47 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYzSDw-3r5I   Posted on YouTube: December 12, 2009 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: December 14, 2009 By DU Member: grassfed Views on DU: 3546

 

The complete interview:
http://fora.tv/2009/11/18/John_Perkins_How_to_Remake_the_Global_Economy

[JohnyCanuck]

1. k&r n/t

[the blues]

2. That last line really brings it all home.

[EmeraldCityGrl]

3. Maybe complete financial collapse needs to

happen in order for people to wake up from their coma and begin to question what has been stolen from them.

Let it be painful and let it be felt in every corner of the world.

[DeSwiss]

9. I was just thinking the same thing today. n/t

[bertman]

11. The chaos, devastation, and horror a complete financial collapse would precipitate are

unimaginable. Please rethink your suggestion, EmeraldCityGirl. Famine, pestilence, massive slaughter of humans and animals are just a few of the consequences that we humans would experience on a global scale. Let's hope for a less dramatic and traumatic way of making the change to a more sane and humane financial system.

[KansDem]

13. You sound just like a friend of mine with whom I had lunch two weekends ago...

I poised (rhetorically) the question, "What if we didn't bail out the banks and Wall Street? What would have happened then?," and he answered rather slowly and deliberately, "Well, we'd lose our jobs; we'd lose our homes. Do you want that?"

And I thought afterward, "So we need to coddle the wealthy in order to maintain the (slipping) lifestyle we are "enjoying" now?" The wealthy screw-up so we have to bail them out so we don't go down? Really? If we let them go, wouldn't a new class of entrepreneur rise up to take their place?

I'll have to ask him that at our next lunch...

[bertman]

17. Unfortunately, the wealthy will still have their homes, their islands, their jewels, their gold.

Some of the wealthy will lose possessions and investments but not EVERYTHING THE OWN. It's the people on the bottom who get squished like bugs when an economy collapses. Sure, some of the nouveau riche will lose their wealth, but the ones who are multi-millionaires and billionaires are already hedging against the fallout from a collapse.

At least here in America, that lifestyle we enjoy is far better than in a lot of places on the planet. "We" meaning those among us who still have jobs and have not been ravaged by this Not-So-Great Depression. I'd choose a steady climb upward that helped some of those who have hit bottom over a bust that brought down the system.

[midnight]

4. Isn't there anything our President can do about these predatory loans that

were designed to not function?

[roseBudd]

14. The barn door was opened (Gramm-Leach-Bliley & CFMA) and the horses got out...

not passing TARP would not have put the horses back in the barn. The barn would have burned down.

Freshman D rep Steve Driehaus-OH class of 08 said as much when he came to speak to a group that calls themselves the United Coalition of Reason after a couple of members suggested the abyss would be good if it brought revolution.

[WhoIsNumberNone]

5. But all my right wing friends say it's the Demoncrats fault-

-for forcing the banks to make loans to poor people who couldn't afford to pay them back! Rush & Glenn wouldn't lie to them, would they?

[BB1]

6. Oh hell. Of Course it is!

Those poor banks have been set up by the govt. 'Hand out free money now! We'll hold a gun to your head if you don't give away money to deadbeats this very second!'

Ow wait, the banks held a gun up to govt to bully govt into giving free money to the banks. Don't Rush know that?

[WhoIsNumberNone]

7. Yes, but he's not telling his audience, so SHHH!

It's a secret.

[bertman]

12. I get that same b.s. from my right-wing friends and family, so here's what I will be using

for my stock reply from now on:

"Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative."

This is from yesterday's commentary by Paul Krugman.

I took particular note of the comment that ONLY ONE OF THE TOP 25 SUBPRIME LENDERS was subject to the regulations in question.

Hope this is helpful. Now, please excuse me. I have to go somewhere quiet and memorize this verbatim.

[roseBudd]

15. I ngot better proof than Krugman for wingnuts, Wall St. Journal, 10/23/08

Republican Greenspan's testimony

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/10/23/greenspan-testimony-on-sources-of-financial-crisis/

What went wrong with global economic policies that had worked so effectively for nearly four decades? The breakdown has been most apparent in the securitization of home mortgages. The evidence strongly suggests that without the excess demand from securitizers, subprime mortgage originations (undeniably the original source of crisis) would have been far smaller and defaults accordingly far fewer. But subprime mortgages pooled and sold as securities became subject to explosive demand from investors around the world. These mortgage backed securities being “subprime” were originally offered at what appeared to be exceptionally high risk-adjusted market interest rates. But with U.S. home prices still rising, delinquency and foreclosure rates were deceptively modest. Losses were minimal. To the most sophisticated investors in the world, they were wrongly viewed as a “steal.”

The consequent surge in global demand for U.S. subprime securities by banks, hedge, and pension funds supported by unrealistically positive rating designations by credit agencies was, in my judgment, the core of the problem. Demand became so aggressive that too many securitizers and lenders believed they were able to create and sell mortgage backed securities so quickly that they never put their shareholders’ capital at risk and hence did not have the incentive to evaluate the credit quality of what they were selling. Pressures on lenders to supply more “paper” collapsed subprime underwriting standards from 2005 forward. Uncritical acceptance of credit ratings by purchasers of these toxic assets has led to huge losses.

It was the failure to properly price such risky assets that precipitated the crisis. In recent decades, a vast risk management and pricing system has evolved, combining the best insights of mathematicians and finance experts supported by major advances in computer and communications technology. A Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of the pricing model that underpins much of the advance in derivates markets. This modern risk management paradigm held sway for decades. The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year because the data inputted into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria. Had instead the models been fitted more appropriately to historic periods of stress, capital requirements would have been much higher and the financial world would be in far better shape today

[bertman]

18. Thanks for posting that, roseBudd. Good info.

[roseBudd]

20. I try to use sources wingnuts can not dismiss as liberal rags, I use Bloomberg..

Wall St. Journal, conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, Forbes, and even the American Conservative

Bush's Broken Record

http://www.amconmag.com/issue/2008/nov/17/

Chris Cox indicts Gramm-Leach-Bliley

http://www.investmentnews.com/article/20080923/REG/809239976

[Nikki Stone1]

19. +1

..

[Douglas Carpenter]

8. very, very interesting --- kick and recommend

[DeSwiss]

10. There's that man again....

...whenever I see the name John Perkins, I know that something terrible is coming right after that.

"America's national motto has essentially become: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-594683847743189197&hl=en&emb=1">You can't say we didn't warn you." ~ Dave Barry

K&R

[earcandle]

16. I don't think it matters any longer who is right, who is wrong, or who dunnit. We need to

figure out how to get people back to work and how to fund
small businesses.
The banks have a new attitude and they are not going to help. 
I heard one
banker say that the President nor the congress has no
regulatory power over 
banks and they are not going to lend to anyone unless they
have the assets to
pay it back.

Mondragon, anyone?  We need to find out way.  We are smart and
we could be more friendly.
IMNSHO. 

[roseBudd]

21. True but blame must be placed or Republicans will claw their way back to power