Politics!

[Berliner]

It's done.

[scamboogah]

I'm glad.

Do they have to wait until Monday before proposing amendments and telling Lieberman to go fuck himself?

[Adult Ed]

It's done.

I predict that if this is voted on on Monday, the first person to die on Tuesday will be blamed on Obamacare. I base this on the fact that yesterday's snow apparently disproved global warming.

[nathansmart]

Is it true that the pre-existing conditions part of the bill only applies to children until 2014?

[Berliner]

Um...no. Where did you hear that? It sounds completely crazy.

[nathansmart]

it was on the front of the Wall Street Journal I was reading while passing out the mail at work

[TimBuktu]

Can someone sum up what this bill actually does? I haven't been able to keep up.

[smartbunny]

health care bill explained in 5 minutes

[Berliner]

health care bill explained in 5 minutes

Fuck you microsoft silverlight!

Obameter

[Umlaut]

an actual poll from conservative website World Net Daily.

[scamboogah]

They should be careful. That last option almost makes them sound like delusional babies....

[maxbarth]

I apologize if someone has brought this up already, but the fact that Harry Reid first voted "no" by accident...before quickly correcting himself.

very funny. How hard is it to remember to say "aye" when the bill you spent MONTHS WORKING ON and YEARS PLANNING/HOPING FOR comes to a vote?

[Berliner]

Anyone with a subscription to the New Yorker willing to paste the article?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...a_fact_cassidy

[Reverend Pudding]

Is this the right place, Berliner...?

P.S: I am afraid of your Avatar

[Berliner]

I think one of the great myths that was uncovered during the Bush era was that social equality (or stability as they talk about in this case) is sacrificed for better overall economic performance.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cha...cial-democracy

I can't say I'm a social democrat either, but this is pretty damning data.

[Reverend Pudding]

I'm a social democrat, but only because "socialist" isn't a safe label to use in internationally-mixed company.

I've started a blog here. It includes two entries concentrating on the "Girther Movement", and is written from the perspective of my rabidly right wing Reverend Pudding character.

I've also posted "Para-Sailin' with Sarah Palin" under the title "Political Satire" in the Stage Time forum.

Feedback and discussion of either would be very welcome. I'm fascinated by the Glenn Becks, the Tea Partiers, the Birthers/Deathers, etc. of the United States.

[Berliner]

So looking back at what caused the financial meltdown. I'm still unsure whether it was mainly due to lack of regulation, bad regulation, or some combination of both. In other words, whether the poor choices of the financial industry was due to regulations that were too lax, or regulations that were badly written and distorted the balance of risk, gain, and loss for bankers. Thoughts?!

[Kentock]

Investment banks spend a lot of time making deals, and their ostensible goal is to manage and distribute risk. But the investor most likely to make risky bets is the one who doesn't understand that his bets are risky. So a lot of investment banks spent a lot of time selling investment vehicles to people who had no idea what they were buying. The lack of transparency in a lot of these CDOs and other investment vehicles, paired with the complicity of the credit ratings agencies, caused a ton of people to invest in dangerous and unstable investments that they assumed were fine. But they weren't.

The problem is, that trend seems to be endemic to the capital markets as a whole. Middlemen make money by setting up deals, and the more they set up, the more patsies they need. So they hide their risky, dangerous assets under a bright new shiny hood, get an AAA rating, and pass it off to pension funds and endowments . Then the banks all make bets (credit default swaps) on the stability of one another's shitpiles.

What I'm saying is that there is absolutely no reason to believe that anything has been fixed.

[Berliner]

Yeah. My understanding is that it was that the vehicles became too complex and securitized, and that also a cause of the problem was that they were essentially making huge risky bets that would make them a lot of money and would allow them to be hailed as financial geniuses if they panned out, and would be someone else's problem (the public, FDIC, Freddie, Fannie) if they failed, creating a environment where the "rationally self-interested" banker would constantly make risky bets with other people's money.

I'm wondering, if the industry had more regulations that made bankers more responsible for their poor decisions, would it have made enough of a difference? Or was everyone too drunk on financial innovation and asset bubbles? Would these securities, which did get AAA ratings, have slipped through even the best regulations?

Also, were badly written regulations, like the ambigious quasi-private, quasi-public status of Freddie and Fannie responsible for people just assuming that they would come bail everyone out at the last minute? And would this also encourage incredibly risky behavior?

[Kentock]

I just read Liar's Poker, where Michael Lewis implies that John Gutfreund's decision to make Salomon Brothers go public was one of the most fundamentally harmful decisions in the history of investment banking. The bankers went from truly dedicated stewards of their company's health to short-sighted, bonus oriented dealmakers. And the shareholders, who clearly have no idea what is going on in the company, got screwed. And then firm after firm followed suit. So they did to their own companies what they're doing now to the pensions and endowments.

Actually, Lewis might have talked about this more in his recent writing, but I forget where he's writing now.