I Told You So ? Yes I Did

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LeVeL said:
:lol: I got a bit ahead of myself there, seeing as the bubble comment was rather unrelated. Housing bubble for one... none of Bush's or Obama's aides seemed to wonder if something is not right. As far as bailouts - at least Bush disapproved of them. Oh well.
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Dogbert said:
The housing bubble had collapsed by the time Obama came into office. And Bush didn't disapprove of the bailouts, he's the one who signed them into law.
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Err my head hurts trying to make sense of what Level is trying to say here.
 
LeVeL said:
Obama came into office just as everything was collapsing, not quite after.
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Case-Shiller home index summary for 2008.

http://www.standardandpoors.com/ser...lobwhere=1243618038238&blobheadervalue3=UTF-8

The national peak for home prices was June or July of 2006 depending on how you measure the market.

By the end of 2008 home prices had fallen 20 plus percent.

The current 2009 chart shows the recent trough date as April of 2009.

http://www.standardandpoors.com/ser...lobwhere=1243640559694&blobheadervalue3=UTF-8

So yes I would say that the Obama administration came in after the bubble burst and was able to do some things to stabilize and start to correct it.

According to the NBER the recession started in December of 2007.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/12/01/nber-makes-it-official-recession-started-in-december-2007/

There is some debate on if the recession has ended yet.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/dissent-on-recessions-end/

Typically you don't get exact end dates on recessions till well after, sometimes a year or more, they actually ended. Doesn't surprise me that the data hasn't become clear yet.

The Dow and the S&P bottomed out the first week of March 2009 though they tried to correct a couple of times right after Obama came into office and just couldn't hold the higher prices.
 
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LeVeL said:
I don't agree with everything they do, of course not. I just support the nation/land blindly, that's all. I don't like Obama, yet I'm proud to travel with my shiny blue passport :)
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Why would you support a nation blindly? What does that accomplish? I understand standing in ranks, but don't you care if you're doing your part to destroy the country you love?

LeVeL said:
All opinion and different people are entitled to think differently :)
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Yeah.
 
LeVeL said:
Obama came into office just as everything was collapsing, not quite after.

Yes, but as he did so he demanded to know how on earth a company can be "too big to fail".
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That's one of the things that's on the other side of the "blame Bush" defense that bothers me; when you don't blame Bush, and you shift the blame to Obama instead.

Not only does the overwhelming historical data show that the financial and housing bubbles collapsed during Bush's second term, but that the writing was on the wall his first term... and yet Obama is still being blamed for both.
 
It probably would have happened if the United States was run by Neil Kinnock too, to be realistic.
 
nomix said:
It probably would have happened if the United States was run by Neil Kinnock too, to be realistic.
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Possibly but if we hadn't of spent hundreds of billions of dollars on Iraq (always emergency funding that wasn't accounted for in the regular budget oh and they used some of that money to develop new weapons too) tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 and the prescription drug benefit for medicare that wasn't funded and expanded the deficit by amounts we sill aren't sure about then we would have been in better shape to weather the financial crisis.

12-16-09bud-rev6-28-10-f1.jpg
 
Yeah, but Kinnick would have invaded the City of London instead.
 
nomix said:
Why would you support a nation blindly? What does that accomplish? I understand standing in ranks, but don't you care if you're doing your part to destroy the country you love?
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Like I said, I may not agree with everything Israel does, but I still support it. I cant stand a hell of a lot of things that happen in the US, but I still stand behind this nation no matter what.


Dogbert said:
That's one of the things that's on the other side of the "blame Bush" defense that bothers me; when you don't blame Bush, and you shift the blame to Obama instead.

Not only does the overwhelming historical data show that the financial and housing bubbles collapsed during Bush's second term, but that the writing was on the wall his first term... and yet Obama is still being blamed for both.
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Ok, the majority of the economic shitshow happened during Bush; however Obama definitely caught some of it and hasn't done enough to fix it, imo. I will give him one thing though - good call on the stimulus.
 
LeVeL said:
Like I said, I may not agree with everything Israel does, but I still support it. I cant stand a hell of a lot of things that happen in the US, but I still stand behind this nation no matter what.
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I'm sorry to say it, but that's a very silly pov. That is, in fact, like not stopping your kids from shooting heroin. Sometimes, standing behind someone is to tell them the truth, even the hard ones, to stop them ruining themselves, destroying their mind and body.
 
Dogbert said:
That's one of the things that's on the other side of the "blame Bush" defense that bothers me; when you don't blame Bush, and you shift the blame to Obama instead.

Not only does the overwhelming historical data show that the financial and housing bubbles collapsed during Bush's second term, but that the writing was on the wall his first term... and yet Obama is still being blamed for both.
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Everyone is to blame not just the president. Everyone btw, includes everyone who spent money they didn't have, not just people in the government.
 
nomix said:
I'm sorry to say it, but that's a very silly pov. That is, in fact, like not stopping your kids from shooting heroin. Sometimes, standing behind someone is to tell them the truth, even the hard ones, to stop them ruining themselves, destroying their mind and body.
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I don't think I made myself clear. If Israel does something I disagree with (and they have), I have no problem saying so. Overall though, I certainly support them. I would stop my kid from shooting heroin in order to guide him down a better path but that path will not be death. A lot of people that disagree with Israel's actions would rather there not be an Israel in the first place and that is not how I feel at all.


katwalk said:
Everyone is to blame not just the president. Everyone btw, includes everyone who spent money they didn't have, not just people in the government.
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Oh, I blame the housing bubble on idiots like John Doe, who earned $20k a year and thought that he could afford a $500k home.
 
LeVeL said:
I don't think I made myself clear. If Israel does something I disagree with (and they have), I have no problem saying so. Overall though, I certainly support them. I would stop my kid from shooting heroin in order to guide him down a better path but that path will not be death. A lot of people that disagree with Israel's actions would rather there not be an Israel in the first place and that is not how I feel at all.
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Good, that's not how I feel either. And apart from certain fundamentalists, I meet very few persons who hold that belief. And even a couple of radical communists, properly engaged in the conflict actually think there shouldn't be an Israel. THere's some that talk about the moral injustice of 48, but to say it's a commonly held belief that Israel shouldn't be there is for the most part a moot point, even in the arab world. It's not even part of the debate in a country like Norway, that's been one of the strongest proponents of ie. a Palestinian state during the last decades.

If I have ever given the impression that I think Israel should seize to exist, that saddens me. I have never held that belief, not even in my more radical youth when I thought rich people were generally evil.

I've got a beef with people who can't seperate critisism from a total lack of support. Okay, so Bush gave Israel 92 % support, or whatever. Obama's down to 90 %.

I guess I'm not guessing wrong if I guess that you don't support the settlements, then?
 
LeVeL said:
Ok, the majority of the economic shitshow happened during Bush; however Obama definitely caught some of it and hasn't done enough to fix it, imo. I will give him one thing though - good call on the stimulus.
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The financial crisis and housing burst were like a snowball rolling downhill once it got started it was very hard to stop. What else could The Obama Administration do to fix it? A larger stimulus package would have been good but just getting the smaller one through was almost impossible. A second stimulus would be great but you will never get the votes for it now. The Republicans have done their best to block anything and everything that might be seen as an accomplishment for The Administration because the more they can obstruct the more they can say, "see they don't know what they are doing and gov't doesn't work when they are in power."

The ultra cynical side of me says that they want the economy to keep floundering and unemployment to stay high because it increases the chances they will regain power.

LeVeL said:
Oh, I blame the housing bubble on idiots like John Doe, who earned $20k a year and thought that he could afford a $500k home.
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While some stuff like that did happen and there was some absolute fraud there was also a lot of sketchy bank officers and mortgage brokers out there.

Listen to this story. I bought my house in the Summer of 2006 and I had a pretty good idea of what I could spend. I knew what my cap for the price of the house was and what payments that would equal for 30 year and 15 year loans plus an estimate of what the taxes and insurance would be in the places I was looking. I thought of myself as a pretty savvy well informed buyer. I can do basic loan calcs in my head from selling cars for so long so I wasn't going to let anyone pull anything over on me...

Or so I thought.

Sitting down with the broker he is doing some back of the envelope estimates based on how much I make, what debt I already have, credit score, etc. I had a few cars at the time and was prepared to sell all but one if I needed to in order to get a larger down payment and clean up the debt to income ratio. I got a car for work so only needed one car.

I didn't tell the broker any of this off the top though. I knew what I could spend with keeping the cars and what I could spend with selling them.

He finishes up his estimates and comes up with a price for the house we could afford about 70,000 dollars more then my absolute max.

Err that isn't going to work I tell him. He goes oh no that will give you a payment of X,XXX that fits in with what you make.

Ok buddy lets step back here.

1. That only fits in with what I make if I don't spend money on anything else and don't save anything.
2. That doesn't include taxes and insurance.
3. You can't get to that payment using a regular 30 year or 15 year fixed loan.
4. I am in commissioned sales and my income goes up and down considerably I want more of a cushion.


The guy's jaw drops open and he kind of mumbles.

I take his pen and paper and redo everything without his calculator.

This is the range I can spend per month with taxes, which gives me a payment of around here and houses in this price range in these towns or this price range in those towns.

If you can't make something like that work we will talk to someone else.

I should have just walked out right then because the whole rest of the time up to closing he kept just bothering me and doing things that made me suspicious but he was recommended by the realtor and the realtor was my the husband of one of my wife's coworkers. How he got me at the end was after we had already signed all the papers buying the house, authorizing the funds transfer and doing the paper work for the deed there were some extra papers that needed corrections and were forgotten.

Not important they said just and adjustment that had to be made.

Adjustment made my ears perk up so I started reading through them. They had tacked on a $5,000 fee into the loan that was not on the prelim paperwork, pre-approval, the original contract we did with the deposit or the final loan paperwork we just signed.

I told them I wasn't signing this. They said I already had this was just the correction for another form. I told them the whole deal was on hold till this fee was taken care of.

If they tired to pull all that bull shit on someone who was watching out for it and deals with loans and large sums of money everyday can you imagine what they pulled over on regular people?
 
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LeVeL said:
Oh, I blame the housing bubble on idiots like John Doe, who earned $20k a year and thought that he could afford a $500k home.
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Oh no, the entire goddamn system is to blame, too. If you actually went through and looked at how unregulated and conniving the banking systems were in the middle of this decade, it wouldn't surprise you in the slightest that they ended up collapsing under their own greed. People bought what they were shoveling hook/line/sinker, but they were still the ones shoveling the shit.

British_Rover said:
The ultra cynical side of me says that they want the economy to keep floundering and unemployment to stay high because it increases the chances they will regain power.
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That's not even an ultra-cynical view. It's being thrust into the spotlight now because of the tax cuts coming into play, and it put the obstructionist conservatives in a hard spot with a lot of people. I'd be interested to see how many unemployed people there are vs. how many people make >$250k.
 
British_rover, that's a good post from you as usual, however, you could have done it shorter.

Lots of Joe Does don't know about economy, Joe Does went to people who knew about economy, and listened to them. Very few people loaned money without TALKING to their bank man.
 
British_Rover said:
The Republicans have done their best to block anything and everything that might be seen as an accomplishment for The Administration because the more they can obstruct the more they can say, "see they don't know what they are doing and gov't doesn't work when they are in power."

The ultra cynical side of me says that they want the economy to keep floundering and unemployment to stay high because it increases the chances they will regain power.
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And this is why I think that politicians are largely scumbags.

As far as you buying your house - you did the smart thing and realized that brokers and bankers and whoever else don't give a shit about your payments - they just want as much of your money as possible. So you looked closely at what they were doing. Most people are too stupid to do that, for better or for worse.
 
What did you just say about my father? :mad:

Just joking. Although, he did spend 12 years in local politics, and is weirdly very respected for it to this day, 4 years since he let it go.
 
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