Here, Beachman. Your very own thread.

Enjoy!

If I recall, Beachman and his gang couldn't quite understand that the Bush Administration had substantial culpability for the financial meltdown. Since I didn't want to revive any of the election political threads with a new post notwithstanding that it was in those threads the previous discussion took place, I thought it might be appropriate to post the latest news pertaining to why the collapse happened here particularly given the possibility Beachman may offer his own counter-theory:

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.

"Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories," California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job.

Bowing to aggressive lobbying — along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK — regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.

"These mortgages have been considered more safe and sound for portfolio lenders than many fixed rate mortgages," David Schneider, home loan president of Washington Mutual, told federal regulators in early 2006. Two years later, WaMu became the largest bank failure in U.S. history.

The administration's blind eye to the impending crisis is emblematic of its governing philosophy, which trusted market forces and discounted the value of government intervention in the economy. Its belief ironically has ushered in the most massive government intervention since the 1930s.

For the complete article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081201/ap_on_bi_ge/meltdown_ignored_warnings_2

Those with iTunes on their computers should go to iTunesU (iTunes University) and search for talks by two Nobel economists--Joe Stiglitz (under Oxford University) and Paul Krugman (under UChannel)--for interesting, detailed discussions of the origins and likely fallout of the mortgage meltdown and consequent credit crunch.

Thanks Bwana. I not only downloaded the two talks you mentioned, but found a lot of free stuff I didn't realize was at the iTunes store.

Now if only I can find the time to listen and/or watch all the stuff I just downloaded.

Bwana,

Since some of the guys on this board aren't too familiar with iTunes, could you explain how to find iTunes University. I did a search in my iTunes and came up empty. WTF is it?

Jag

Open iTunes. Go to the iTunes Store, and on the left hand side, under "iTunes STORE" you'll see iTunes U (under iTunes Latino and above iPod Games).

There is a lot of really interesting (and free!) stuff there.

Thanks Laguy, that'll keep amused for months

As long as Beachman keeps activating his idiotically-titled thread about President Obama, I will keep activating this more appropriately-titled thread.

Maybe he'll do the right thing and start posting here rather than there.

It is amusing to see his posts on baseball and realize that he knows as little about that topic as he does about the economy, foreign policy, and P4P sex!

Bwana: Are you suggesting we need a new thread entitled "Beachman's Baseball Wankings," or should we just be parsimonious and see if we can rename this one "Beachman's Wankings"?

I think one platform is enough...let's go with your latter suggestion. Maybe one of the web experts here could design him a blog (posted elsewhere!) where he could wank on any topic to his heart's content.

Here Beachman, Beachman, Beachman.
Here Beachman, Beachman, Beachman.

I guess I won the title of being probably the only guy to meet Beachman. A pretty nice guy in person

I really don't follow politics and get involved with heated discussions.

May I suggest a new entry to our dictionary (see his latest political post):

Beachmanned: to be overwhelmed by stupidity

I'm not sure though whether the correct spelling is with one or two n's, but I'm sure everyone on the site (except Beachman, of course) would understand the word well under either spelling.

Could we please expedite the Beachmanned dictionary entry? His last "dumber than a tree stump" post in his retardedly-named thread really begs for this.

He said something again so it's time to activate his thread.

Big sigh . . .

Maybe he will learn the proper place to post his nonsense. In the meantime, here is an interesting website. Perhaps Beachman will get confused and plagiarize from this one.

http://www.republicanoffenders.com/

Here is a report that should get Beachman excited--

A $95,000 question: why are whites five times richer than blacks in the US?

• Study finds gaping racial divide in household assets
• Economic policies blamed for growing inequality

Chris McGreal in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Monday 17 May 2010 19.47 BST


A huge wealth gap has opened up between black and white people in the US over the past quarter of a century – a difference sufficient to put two children through university – because of racial discrimination and economic policies that favour the affluent.

A typical white family is now five times richer than its African-American counterpart of the same class, according to a report released today by Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

White families typically have assets worth $100,000 (£69,000), up from $22,000 in the mid-1980s. African-American families' assets stand at just $5,000, up from around $2,000.

A quarter of black families have no assets at all. The study monitored more than 2,000 families since 1984.

"We walk that through essentially a generation and what we see is that the racial wealth gap has galloped, it's escalated to $95,000," said Tom Shapiro, one of the authors of the report by the university's Institute on Assets and Social Policy.

"That's primarily because the whites in the sample were able to accumulate financial assets from their $22,000 all the way to $100,000 and the African-Americans' wealth essentially flatlined."

The survey does not include housing equity, because it is not readily accessible and is rarely realised as cash. But if property were included it would further widen the wealth divide.

Shapiro says the gap remains wide even between blacks and whites of similar classes and with similar jobs and incomes.

"How do we explain the wealth gap among equally-achieving African-American and white families? The same ratio holds up even among low income groups. Finding ways to accumulate financial resources for all low and moderate income families in the United States has been a huge challenge and that challenge keeps getting steeper and steeper.

"But there are greater opportunities and less challenges for low and moderate income families if they're white in comparison to if they're African-American or Hispanic," he said.

America has long lived with vast inequality, although 40 years ago the disparity was lower than in Britain.

Today, the richest 1% of the US population owns close to 40% of its wealth. The top 25% of US households own 87%.

The rest is divided up among middle and low income Americans. In that competition white people come out far ahead.

Only one in 10 African-Americans owns any shares. A third do not have a pension plan, and among those who do the value is on average a fifth of plans held by whites.

Shapiro says one of the most disturbing aspects of the study is that wealth among the highest-income African-Americans has actually fallen in recent years, dropping from a peak of $25,000 to about $18,000, while among white counterparts of similar class and income it has surged to around $240,000.

In 1984, high-income black Americans had more assets than middle-income whites. That is no longer true.

"I'm a pretty jaded and cynical researcher in some way, but this was shocking, quite frankly, a really important dynamic," said Shapiro. "This represents a broken chain of achievement. In the United States context, when we are thinking about racial equality and the economy we have focused for a long time on equal opportunity.

"Equal opportunity assumes that some people who have that opportunity are going to have pretty high achievements in terms of their jobs, their work, their income, their home ownership.

"The assumption in a democracy is that merit and achievement are going to be rewarded and the rewards here are financial assets. We should see some rough parity and we don't."

The report attributes part of the cause to the "powerful role of persistent discrimination in housing, credit and labour markets. African-Americans and Hispanics were at least twice as likely to receive high-cost home mortgages as whites with similar incomes," the report says.

Although many black families have moved up to better-paying jobs, they begin with fewer assets, such as inheritance, on which to build wealth. They are also more likely to have gone into debt to pay for university loans.

"African-Americans, before the 1960s, first by law and then by custom, were not really allowed to own businesses. They had very little access to credit. There was a very low artificial ceiling on the wealth that could be accumulated. Hence there was very little, if anything, that could be passed along to help their children get to college, to help their children buy their first homes, or as an inheritance when they die," said Shapiro.

Since the 1980s, US administrations have also geared the tax system to the advantage of the better off. Taxes on unearned income, such as shares and inheritance, fell sharply and are much lower than taxes on pay.

"The more income and wealth people had, the less it was taxable," said Shapiro.

There were also social factors, the study found. "In African-American families there is a much larger extended network of kin as well as other obligations. From other work we've done we know that there's more call on the resources of relatively well-off African-American families; that they lend money that's not given back; they help cousins go to school. They help brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with all kinds of legal and family problems," said Shapiro.