you guys need to open your minds. if you really read my slave example you would see that it would work. and it is what is happening. just consider that they know what they are doing. it is funny how some people say the distribution of wealth is fine because those people with all the wealth are just smarter than us and that is why they were able to get so rich. but no, not THAT smart that they somehow planned this collapse that has benefitted them so greatly. in fact they were stupid for having this happen. sure they benefitted at the exact same time as the collapse happening, but who knows how that happens. let me go read a dense academic article to come up with some jibberish to explain away why that happened.

"The bank makes roughly $0 if everyone whose loan is recalled goes bankrupt..."
No, because they now own every house in America because everyone just defaulted simultaneously defaulted on their mortgages.

"the banks did get bailed out, didnt they? "
That was one of my points, if the elite made money on this scheme, then none of the banks would have declared bankruptcy, but a few of them did, because they lost billions of dollars from the defaults.

"No, because they now own every house in America because everyone just defaulted simultaneously defaulted on their mortgages."

No, because the banks already owned the houses of most people who this would happen too. Further, owning houses only turns to a profit if there are people to buy them.

That was one of my points, if the elite made money on this scheme, then none of the banks would have declared bankruptcy

how is that? so the elites would keep all banks solvent in order to make money? why? speaking of lehmans did i tell you that their lawyers swore to a court that jp morgan intentionally caused them to go bankrupt? and this is the time in that pbs documentary where they are explaining how all the banks are working together to all stay solvent and the government just let one fail to send a message to wallstreet, causing the disaster. unsurprisingly more bs from the media.

yes ok great, you all know exactly what you are talking about. the banks really really wanted those mortgages to be repaid. really. but somehow they werent and somehow the elites who control the banks are richer than ever. its a real tragedy for those elites. whatever i cant break through to you all. just think about it. maybe someday you will see i am right. i was intending on posting a new story everyday here anyway not arguing the same story over multiple days.

@Abge fair enough.
@Blank: If the bank goes bankrupt it means it didn't make any money. If the elites were making as much money as you think they were, then the banks wouldn't have gone bankrupt.

"the banks did stop issuing loans didnt they?"

Ummm, no. No, they didn't. I refinanced about 2 years ago. I was looking into buying a different house about two months ago and several bankers emailed me begging to give me a loan. I get credit card offers in the mail every day. What gives you the idea that banks aren't giving out loans? Oh, they've backed off giving out loans like candy....why? Because they got burned by the bank crisis.

"let me go read a dense academic article to come up with some jibberish to explain away why that happened"

You don't need to do that. This recent housing bubble/financial collapse was the logical and predictable result of our culture's attitude towards debt.

the banks are publicly traded. the elites are smart enough to know that bankruptcies in publicly traded companies can be a net benefit to them. the same way the airlines went bankrupt in order to screw employees out of their pensions. if you take enough wealth from a company that it has to go bankrupt then how do you lose? the shareholders, as a whole, lose. most of those losses are by institutional investors. but the elite control those giant corporations so if there is any bankruptcy it is typically not a bad thing for them. you are always thinking in terms of individuals acting alone. the people who controlled lehmans had all their wealth only in lehmans and only cared about its success.... even though the former executives are now making huge sums of money after the company collapsed... so i guess it didnt hurt the executives. but who knows why that is the case.

the economy is controlled. just as woodrow wilson said before he was elected. but then he, like you people, believed the propaganda, when the bankers were publishing story after story on how much they dispised this federal reserve act, and it was *generally known* that banks wanted to avoid it at all costs. so he signed the act and it later turned out the act was (literrally) written by the top bankers. in any event, he was right, the economy is controlled by a few people - it is as true now as it was then. in fact moreso. its just a shame that on here sees it.

i mean *no one on here* (and literally and probably other typos i am getting a bit tired)

but i admit that i could be wrong about woodrow. he could have been in on it all along. i just like to believe he was an idiot rather than evil... but to be honest, it could be either.

So is membership in the elite club passed on from father to son, or is their an initiation rite, or what?

Also, please engage this simple statement: This recent housing bubble/financial collapse was the logical and predictable result of our culture's attitude towards debt.

what do you want me to engage? it is a stupid statement. i already told you those debts were designed to fail in order to make people work hard in the hopes of owning something only to have it all taken away from them.

changing subjects a little, since i was talking about old woodrow i looked at his wikipedia article and apparently he has even more good quotes in there.

The New Freedom (written by woodrow) contains controversial yet relevant assertions. "Our Government has been for the past few years under the control of the heads of great allied corporations with special interests." "The Government has not controlled these interests ... it has submitted itself to their control". - p25, "We vote : we are offered the platform we want ; we elect the men who stand on that platform, and we get absolutely nothing." -p27, "We know that the machines of both parties are subsidised by the same persons, and therefore it is useless to turn in either direction." -p27.

pretty good honesty for a president.

if your father and son theory is to say that those with the most wealth in the world is a constantly changing group so they would never be able to control politics or plan an economic recession that benefits the rich or anything like that then.... i dont know what to say. that is certainly not the case. in fact they do control things and do plan things well in advance. and they do retain their wealth and power over generations. maybe there is not one group called the elite, but i am using this as a label for people with great economic/political/etc power. not only individuals but groups with that power. ask woodrow about it.

I didn't take the the time to read more than one word on this thread, but I feel entitled to comment on it anyway, blankflag is clearly trolling again saying the word bankers .... Blah blah blah.

todays news - cyprus to decide today if it will seize 10% of bank deposits of its citizens as the eu demanded as a condition for the banks bailout.

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/17/17345457-cypriots-asked-to-surrender-up-to-10-percent-of-bank-balances-in-return-for-eu-bailout?lite&lite=obnetwork

a different strategy than iceland. instead of holding those accountable for their actions liable and have them take the loss, they are quite literally stealing money from the population to further enrich the guilty parties. lets see if it works.

I think this time we can agree to that is bullshit and unfair.

"This recent housing bubble/financial collapse was the logical and predictable result of our culture's attitude towards debt."

This is actually a pretty insightful statement. Your failure to understand simple root causes means you don't understand the crisis, or the bust/boom cycle, and since you don't understand the simple underlying causes you have to come up with crazy conspiracy theories.

Here's what I mean. Americans, by and large, believe that debt is a normal and unavoidable fact of life. It may be normal, but it is certainly not unavoidable - certainly not the kind of heavy consumer debt that many Americans carry. And many Americans are trapped in a consumeristic mindset - they *think* they need bigger TV's, bigger cars, bigger houses, more restaurants, newer clothes, brand name clothes, internet phones, etc., and they flock to credit card companies and payday loan outlets to satisfy their cravings - no conspiracy needed.

Add to the mix that those consumers take their attitudes to the polls. They recklessly vote for the politicians who promise the most goodies, regardless of where the money is going to come from - it doesn't matter, just put it on the charge card! Fantastically enough, Europeans are even worse, at least with their government spending. As mentioned before, who in their right mind can believe that you can get a free college education, work for 30 years, and then retire on full benefits and live on the public dime for another 20+ years? No complicated conspiracy needed, the math simply doesn't work.

Take away those consumer attitudes and bankers have absolutely no power. But given those attitudes, there are going to be boom/bust cycles whether there's a conspiracy or not - this recent housing bubble/financial collapse was the logical and predictable result of our culture's attitude towards debt. No conspiracy needed.

If you really want to do something to change the world, start hosting Dave Ramsey classes in your living room instead of trolling on the internet - your friends and family will thank you when their personal finances are blossoming. But if what you really want is disembodied denizens of the world wide web to tell you you're an idiot, and you don't really care about *doing* anything, by all means carry on.

even if you dont agree that the elites are responsible and intentionally causing the collapse, what do you think about todays story, that the eu is ordering governments to just take funds out of citizens bank accounts to basically give to the banks?

That is a truly alarming story, I'll give you that.

ok today is a middle-east double
1. 10th anniversary of iraq invasion celebrated with a car bomb killing 50
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/19/17368610-bombs-kill-at-least-50-on-10th-anniversary-of-iraq-invasion?lite
2. chemical weapon reportedly used in syria which i guarantee will be proven to have been released by the *rebels* but the media will for some reason lose interest in the story after that has been conclusively proven
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/19/17370550-suffocating-in-the-streets-chemical-weapons-attack-reported-in-syria?lite

The Syrian rebels are becoming more obviously radical than the people of Libya and Egypt were prior to their leader's fall. Considering what Egypt and Libya are becoming, that's a real statement.

How about a follow-up story on Cyprus? Did they vote to plunder people's bank accounts or not?

cypress voted against the confiscation, so that is good, but there is fear of a bankrun when the banks reopen thursday. ok todays news is not really news, but i think you guys like to follow what other people say and do, so michael moore has some respect among the heavily propagandized so i saw something interesting of his that can maybe help you guys understand what is happening and see that what i am saying makes sense.

moore: this government hasnt earned the right to be trusted
if it says assad has chemical weapons or if it says
akmadinijad has a nuclear weapon

piers: but its not this government is it that went to
war with saddam and you have to differentiate

moore: which government are you talking about
are you talking about obama vs bush?
no im talking about the real government
wallstreet the banks the corporations

moore: 2 trillion dollars is what we spent on the iraq
war who made that money?...

moore: this is always about the people who have the
pursestrings and the politicians who are bought off by them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nms8dI-kwi8

another update on cyprus, apparently the european central bank still wants the 6 billion in order to grant a bailout so they are proposing now that only those with deposits over 100k euros will get the shaft, but they will lose 15% instead of 10, so that the bank still gets 6 billion. we will have to see how this plays out, i will try to keep up on it.

Looks like the so-called fiscal conservatives in this thread think it is "unfair" and "alarming" to even suggest the possibility of not bailing everyone out for free. Why am I not surprised.

@Ulytau - first of all, fiscal conservatives generally have a strong sense of personal property rights, so the idea of plundering people's banks accounts is quite alarming. Second, the very premise of banking is that when you deposit money in the bank it will be safe - if governments begin raiding banks, the very premise of banking disappears. Finally, fiscal conservatives usually believe that saving money against future need is a personal and civic virtue, and blundering ever further into debt is a vice, indeed the very vice that has brought us to the current banking crisis. Plundering people's savings accounts therefore punishes virtue and rewards vice, without any real evidence that robbing people's savings is anything more than a temporary bandaid. The spendthrifts are still in power, still believing that ever-increasing debt is a sound basis for a healthy economy. In such conditions why would any sane person believe that this 10% raid will be limited to Cyprus, or limited to 10%, or limited to bank accounts and not other forms of wealth such as real estate?

PROPERTY RIGHTS OR GET THE FUCK OUT!

There is nothing more important then property rights, and its unfair for the government to be stealing peoples property just because they chose to keep it in its more liquid form.

All the money government raises ultimately comes at the expense of the citizens. This measure is in principle equivalent to any other wealth tax, although it is specifically targeted and very quick and easy to collect. The fact is, Cypriot government expects the ECB to bail its private banks out without giving anything in return. The only countermeasures Cypriot government came up with were all based on borrowing more money, which is obviously completely unacceptable. Cyprus is playing chicken with the ECB.

Actual fiscal conservatives are deficit hawks, balanced budget or running surpluses to lower any existing debt is THE priority to them - which is why they understand the necessity to raise surtaxes if needed. So-called fiscal conservatives are OK with socialization of losses as long as the revenues of the government never go up. Unsurprisingly, that leads to deficit spending. The policy of starving the beast is, in the words of Bruce Bartlett, "the most pernicious fiscal doctrine in history". As he points out further, Eisenhower knew it (and kept high taxes to cover the costs of the Korean War), Nixon knew it (and prolonged LBJ surtax for Korean war), Ford knew it (and opposed permanent tax cuts), Clinton knew it (and raised taxes) - and the bills for their presidencies looked accordingly, with balanced budgets and lower federal outlays.

So-called fiscal conservatives substituted the goal of eliminating budget deficits by lowering taxes per se, they substituted the goal of lowered spending with one of the means to achieve it. Starting with Reagan, these so-called fiscal conservatives have been continuously undermining the solid fiscal conservative credentials of the Republican party to a point at which they are a mere caricature. Until Republicans as a whole become once again actual fiscal conservatives and focus on the so very real ballooning deficit instead of the chimera of ever-lasting low taxes, the US debt will grow. Because the Democrats sure as hell are not a credible historical alternative.