Single paragraph explanation of the financial crisis by Prof Mark Blyth

[Triana]

[GummyBearz]

1. That lays out how the wealth transfer occurred

nt

[MohRokTah]

2. Are we tlking about the financial crisis from nearly 8 years ago?

I don't get the point of relevance. Obama knew government spending was our only way out and he got it passed.

We haven't been in crisis mode for years now.

[GummyBearz]

3. Uh, look at stocks and high yield bonds

Both markets are freaking out at the same time. It is a crisis for anyone with a 401k, a pension fund, or any type of retirement savings

[MohRokTah]

4. OFFS!

[GummyBearz]

6. Well thought out reply

The fact is Obama continued the Bush policy in the financial markets. It was like putting a bandaid on a bullet wound. No more blood came out.... for a bit. I look forward to another reply from you, hopefully with more insight than an emoji

[MohRokTah]

9. You're screaming the sky is falling because of normal correction behavior in the markets?

Besides laughing and eye roilling, that sort of silliness deserves nothing more.

[Duval]

12. Hey, have you been listening to right wing talk? I hope you will protect your

401K and investments you may now have, because signs indicate a very troubling economy this year.

[MohRokTah]

13. Hey, do you have a clue how the markets work?

Your posts here demonstrate you do not.

[JDPriestly]

33. Would you please explain "how the markets work" to those who do not

know?

This is a discussion forum. We exchange information.

[MohRokTah]

38. The markets go up. The markets go down.

Over time, the markets continue to increase as economies grow.

Last week, the markets dropped due to losses in the Chinese markets. When one market suffers large losses, such as happened in China, all markets suffer some losses due to interaction between regional markets.

In most cases, these corrections result in pricing in all of the markets which are lower than capitation in most stocks would indicate, resulting in bargain pricing that should be capitalized on through purchases of the stock since the next step will be some slow to moderate increases.

All market corrections, including the massive downfall in 2008 can be capilized upon to insure greater than normal returns on investment.

That, in a nutshell, is the most basic explanation of how markets work that is possible.

[glinda]

41. Not sure who saw a greater than normal return. My husband did not. He lost a large part of his

retirement and as far as recovering it fell very short of that.

[MohRokTah]

42. The DOW is still higher than it was at it's highest before the 2008 crash.

People panic and sell during the downfalls, thus they lose.

[glinda]

52. He is under the TRA and their investments did not come back near enough.

[JonLeibowitz]

44. Perfect explanation, well done. DU in general does not understand how Wall St. / investments work

[Uncle Joe]

31. Nothing about the banking crisis of 2008 was "normal correction behavior in the markets" the U.S.

government had to bail them out or our and most of the world's economies would've collapsed.

Nothing was done afterward to prevent such an event from happening again, indeed most of those monopolized financial institutions are even larger now than they were then and as such pose an even greater danger.

You can only play Russian Roulette so long before you lose everything.

[MohRokTah]

37. The poster was talking about the losses in the markets last week. eom

[Ed Suspicious]

18. Your love of Wall Street is impressive in its consistency.

Do you work there?

[Ed Suspicious]

21. This was meant for Moh

[GummyBearz]

22. Got it... that had me pretty confused

and a little riled up for a minute . Thanks for clarifying

[MohRokTah]

39. Capital investment makes the economic world go 'round. eom

[laundry_queen]

43. It sure is. nt

[Octafish]

50. Reminds me of Banned from Kos.

Who got banned from DU, too.

[EdwardBernays]

5. Not a new Problem

Look at how Clinton, Bill went from proposing spending as a solution, to implementing austerity. All it took was one meeting with Ayn Rand Jr ie Alan Greenspan and the left folded. The SAME thing happened after the tech bubble burst and after 2008. Corporations stripped the economy to reinforce their own self-interests - promising it will save the economy.

And yet magically the middle class hasn't recovered. And the rich get richer.

[Octafish]

28. President Clinton and the Chilean Model: Midnight at the House of Good and Evil

The author was a Chicago Boy helping implement the scam for Pinochet:

President Clinton and the Chilean Model.

By José Piñera

Midnight at the House of Good and Evil

"It is 12:30 at night, and Bill Clinton asks me and Dottie: 'What do you know about the Chilean social-security system?'” recounted Richard Lamm, the three-term former governor of Colorado. It was March 1995, and Lamm and his wife were staying that weekend in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.

I read about this surprising midnight conversation in an article by Jonathan Alter (Newsweek, May 13, 1996), as I was waiting at Dulles International Airport for a flight to Europe. The article also said that early the next morning, before he left to go jogging, President Bill Clinton arranged for a special report about the Chilean reform produced by his staff to be slipped under Lamm's door.

That news piqued my interest, so as soon as I came back to the United States, I went to visit Richard Lamm. I wanted to know the exact circumstances in which the president of the world’s superpower engages a fellow former governor in a Saturday night exchange about the system I had implemented 15 years earlier.

Lamn and I shared a coffee on the terrace of his house in Denver. He not only was the most genial host to this curious Chilean, but he also proved to be deeply motivated by the issues surrounding aging and the future of America. So we had an engaging conversation. At the conclusion, I ventured to ask him for a copy of the report that Clinton had given him. He agreed to give it to me on the condition that I do not make it public while Clinton was president. He also gave me a copy of the handwritten note on White House stationery, dated 3-21-95, which accompanied the report slipped under his door. It read:

Dick,
Sorry I missed you this morning.
It was great to have you and Dottie here.
Here's the stuff on Chile I mentioned.
Best,
Bill.

Three months before that Clinton-Lamm conversation about the Chilean system, I had a long lunch in Santiago with journalist Joe Klein of Newsweek magazine. A few weeks afterwards, he wrote a compelling article entitled,[font color="green"] "If Chile can do it...couldn´t North America privatize its social-security system?" [/font color]He concluded by stating that "the Chilean system is perhaps the first significant social-policy idea to emanate from the Southern Hemisphere." (Newsweek, December 12, 1994).

I have reasons to think that probably this piece got Clinton’s attention and, given his passion for policy issues, he became a quasi expert on Chile’s Social Security reform. Clinton was familiar with Klein, as the journalist covered the 1992 presidential race and went on anonymously to write the bestseller Primary Colors, a thinly-veiled account of Clinton’s campaign.

“The mother of all reforms”

While studying for a Masters and a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, I became enamored with America’s unique experiment in liberty and limited government. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the first volume of Democracy in America hoping that many of the salutary aspects of American society might be exported to his native France. I dreamed with exporting them to my native Chile.

So, upon finishing my Ph.D. in 1974 and while fully enjoying my position as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Boston University, I took on the most difficult decision in my life: to go back to help my country rebuild its destroyed economy and democracy along the lines of the principles and institutions created in America by the Founding Fathers. Soon after I became Secretary of Labor and Social Security, and in 1980 I was able to create a fully funded system of personal retirement accounts. Historian Niall Ferguson has stated that this reform was “the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation. Thatcher and Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare started in Chile.”

But while de Tocqueville’s 1835 treatment contained largely effusive praise of American government, the second volume of Democracy in America, published five years later, strikes a more cautionary tone. He warned that “the American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” In fact at some point during the 20th century, the culture of self reliance and individual responsibility that had made America a great and free nation was diluted by the creation of [font color="green"] “an Entitlement State,”[/font color] reminiscent of the increasingly failed European welfare state. What America needed was a return to basics, to the founding tenets of limited government and personal responsibility.

[font color="green"]In a way, the principles America helped export so successfully to Chile through a group of free market economists needed to be reaffirmed through an emblematic reform. I felt that the Chilean solution to the impending Social Security crisis could be applied in the USA.[/font color]

CONTINUED...

http://www.josepinera.org/articles/articles_clinton_chilean_model.htm

It's like the New Deal never happened.

[EdwardBernays]

29. Thanks :)

Good read.

[dreamnightwind]

34. Wow, had never seen that

“The Lewinsky scandal had a powerful, if usually overlooked, impact on the substance of Clinton’s last two years in office as well. When I asked the President what he might have accomplished absent the scandal, he said that he wasn’t sure. When pressed, Clinton acknowledged that he might have been able to reform the Social Security and Medicare systems if the Republicans -and the media-hadn’t been provided with an alternative form of diversion in 1998 and 1999. In fact, Clinton was poised, at the moment he delivered his “Save Social Security First” challenge in the 1998 State of the Union message, to do something few presidents ever had: to end his second term with a valedictory surge of significant accomplishments. He had tamed the Republican Congress. There were huge budget surpluses to play with. “Both parties were behind the curve on the big issues,” said Bruce Reed, Clinton’s domestic policy advisor. “We could have added a private-investment option on to Social Security benefits.”

So a CATO-affiliated Chilean reform to add a private-investment option to Social Security was all good to go, with the blessings of our Democratic president who was all set to use the new budget surplus to move to such a system.

Many of us thought at the time what a shame it was that the Lewinsky scandal derailed Clinton's agenda. Now that we see more of the details of what that agenda was, we were extremely fortunate to dodge this bullet.

It looks like the version Clinton would have give us was even worse than the Chilean model:

The transition was a complex proposal, but we were able to do it. We kept part of the payroll tax in the pay-as-you-go system in order to finance the elderly benefits. We used the budget surplus as the president is suggesting in this country. And finally, we cut all corporate welfare. We told the private companies that they do not need government money. That money should be used to finance the national retirement system.

We told the private companies that they do not need government money. That money should be used to finance the national retirement system.

So, the reform was not about savings or about macroeconomic equilibrium. It was about workers’ dignity, workers’ freedom, workers’ choice, and workers’ empowerment. I believe this can be done in America.

Anyone think the U.S. would have funded it by ending corporate welfare? Hell no, they were going to use the budget surplus and keep the corporate welfare.

The Chilean system's architect has a long lunch with Joe Klein, who is working on the "Primary Colors" Clinton campaign story and has primary presidential access, and who publishes a Newsweek story on the plan in Newsweek, getting Bill all hot and bothered to touch the third rail with his third way policy pen, private retirement accounts rather than progressive reforms such as raising or eliminating the payroll tax cap. The Chilean author had apparently been working on this with our old friend Pete Peterson.

Clinton sacrificed “an enduring legacy when he had an affair with Lewinsky, the young White House intern. Liberal Democrats were opposed to his pension changes, so to get their support to avoid impeachment, Clinton postponed the package of reforms.” (James Daw, The Toronto Star, September 22, 2002).

So the Lewinsky affair saved us from this plan, since Clinton couldn't pistol-whip his own liberal Democrats when he desperately needed their support to remain in office during the impeachment.

History takes some bizarre turns and twists. In this case, we have much to be thankful for, we were quite fortunate.

Thanks Octafish, very informative and illuminating.

This is exactly the kind of reforms the corporatists in our party have been triangulating against us to implement, and the kind of policy efforts that inform my political choices going forward. We need a highly educated and informed electorate to sniff this stuff out and its advocates before they get into office. The stench of third-way economics is all over our party's establishment.

[DhhD]

47. Bill Clinton at the Pete Peterson Institute speaking with other Democrats and Republicans such as

Paul Ryan-Now Speaker of the House.

Video about robing the American People of their Social Security and Medicare.

Will another Third way Clinton complete the American corporatist coup to remove the New Deal?

[abelenkpe]

7. K&R

[hfojvt]

8. sorry that's just dumb

"all that debt" did not come from TARP, nor from the stimulus bills.

There was plenty of debt before that, and plenty of causes - the Reagan tax cuts, the Clinton tax cuts, the Bush tax cuts (all mostly benefiting the rich) the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, the prescription drug subsidy, and so on.

And a bunch of the new debt came from the recession - lost revenue and extra expenses caused by that.

Of course, now we have the Obama tax cuts too - $1.3 trillion to the richest 5% over the next decade.

And of course, even more to the richest 20%.

An orgy of tax cuts for the top 20% means that the bottom 40% needs to tighten their belts.

[elias49]

10. Sure glad you smartened that 'dumb' OP up!

I guess.

[valerief]

11. That's because the debt causers own the government. nt

[malaise]

14. You win the thread

[appalachiablue]

16. Would you include US finance leaders like these?

Three US Treasury Secretaries, Treasury Staffer & Facebook Executive Laugh About *INCOME INEQUALITY*
GEITHNER, PAULSON, RUBIN & SANDBERG. Milken Annual Global Conference, Bev. Hills, CA, April 2015. Hilarious, really?

[valerief]

17. Yep. They support the oligarchy all right. nt

[Rex]

15. This will go right over the head of dullards.

Sadly.

[99th_Monkey]

30. What do u mean 'will'? It's already "gone over the heads" of some up-string Wall St. butt kissers nt

[Rex]

35. Their are always more willing to join into the grand scam.

They say everyone has a price and those selling us out are doing so for practically nothing.

[Hiraeth]

19. I have seen this before some where (FB maybe?) bears repeating. K&R

[Cary]

23. Look up Two Santa Claus theory

"Supply-side economics" is to economics what "creation science" is to science.

It's all a conspiracy to grab power.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

24. What pisses me off is when I get an email from someone railing about how much congress gets paid....

As if their salary makes up 70% of the budget.

[FairWinds]

25. Just saw "The Big Short," which addresses this issue.

Of course average income taxpayers had to pay for the bailout - $ 9,500 per person according to CNN Money.

In my view, the film was better than the book because it emphasized, not just the "short," but the top-to-bottom underlying fraud. The banksters knowingly made and sold really bad paper. It was criminal.

All in all, the film was like a two-hour campaign ad for Bernie.

And a big part of the debt also comes from the totally unfunded Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the Bush tax cuts.

Veterans For Peace

[Pacifist Patriot]

40. I saw it yesterday. It's fantastic.

My sister said it should be required viewing in all high school Econ classes.

[cantbeserious]

26. Know Thy Enemy - Oligarchs, Corporations, Banks And Their Media Minions And MIC Henchmen

eom

[Babel_17]

27. The last sentence has the key

Privatize profits, socialize losses, to put it a different way.

[Enthusiast]

32. That is why we never hear this from the corporate media.

It's a secret. It's a secret TPTB don't want you to know.

This is the reason we must elect Bernie Sanders.

[denem]

36. Professor Blyth is missing something important

Government revenue collapses in a recession/depression. It's not just the taxes no longer collected from the jobless, nor the sales taxes forgone on consumer spending, it is company profits going to zero, and losses carried forward.

In Europe the IMF/EU are insisting that countries in deep depression 28% unemployment, raise taxes to protect pension funds, even though the risk, the higher rate of return on those Government Securities is what attracted the funds in the first place.

[Betty Karlson]

45. K&R for truth.

[90-percent]

46. I know nothing about how to successfully invest in Wall Street

I got a 401K at work mid 80's and tried to diversify my portfolio and I ALMOST ALWAYS LOST MY BETS.

I converted to money markets or some other low yield but safe investments and thats where my paltry money stayed until i converted to an IRA.

In the late 90's and early 2000's I decided that Wall Street was totally corrupt and insider trading was the norm.

To my point:

I know diddly about "wise investing" but I recently saw THE BIG SHORT and know that the crash of 2008 caused the unemployment of EIGHT MILLION PEOPLE and the loss of the homes of another SIX MILLION PEOPLE.

And the movie also points out that the systemic problems that caused 2008 HAVE NOT BEEN REMEDIED and therefore some time soon history will repeat itself and there will be another devestating economic collapse.

Now, if we taxpayers let the gov't bail out the banksters again, we will deserve our dystopian fates.

-90% Jimmy

[The2ndWheel]

48. Sounds like a pretty simple explanation

Which is why it would be only one variable in the equation.

[raouldukelives]

49. K&R Ah, Wall St. Where democracy for all went to die.

It is no secret, especially not at this point. We live in the most reality, the most progress, the most democracy corporate investors cannot personally facilitate the blocking and destruction of.

They are the ones that bought off the politicians and destroyed the oversight. They are the ones that get bailed out. All is as it should be.

Those who would commit the one life they have in service against truth, that would trade their ethics, ideals and legacies for personal wealth, should at least get something out of it.

It is too bad for the rest of us that we have to live in it. But that is our burden to bear. Maybe one day they will awake, and start to take others futures half as seriously as their own.

Until then, we will assuredly continue to get what they strive for. More for them and less for everyone else.

[FairWinds]

51. Does Mr. Moh think . .

he is advancing HRC's campaign?

Coming across like Rahm and all?

Veterans for Peace