--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "do.rflex" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[snip] > On the minimum wage, I stand corrected. But with what's left of the > economy and jobs after the fine work of your selfish, greedy > free-market deregulate-the-industry pals in the financial sector it > just might be the only thing available for someone with the skills > mentioned above. I'm glad you've got it all figured out and are able to mete out blame, Bongo. I work in the financial sector and I haven't been able to figure it out yet. There's a whole lot of factors that are apparently responsible for the mess: - Government regulation REQUIRING banks and lending institutions to lend to folks not capable of making payments on house loans. This wasn't deregulation but the OPPOSITE of deregulation; - Mark-to-market rules. Not really sure how this works and why it may be responsible for some of the mess but pundits cite it as one of the causes. Came out of the Enron debacle. Again, it's a regulation, NOT deregulation. - Credit Default Swaps. Yes, this is an area that was deregulated (actually it was, if my understanding is correct, something that was never regulated in the first place because it was an entirely new product and an entirely new market). Too many were sold (they are a kind of derivative that provides a hedge for the funds that the lending institutions gave to the mortgagees if the mortgages were defaulted) without any securities backing them up. So when so many mortgages went belly up, no one was around to actually pay on the credit swaps. But this may also be not so much a case of deregulation but that those agencies like Moody's and Standard and Poor's and A.M. Best which are supposed to be assessing the financial health of institutions such as AIG simply weren't doing their job. If they were, they would have noticed and therefore informed us that those credit swaps weren't being backed up by any real assets. It's funny because AIG -- which sold the bulk of the credit swaps that turned out to be useless -- is being touted as an insurance company that had to be bailed out. Well, all of AIG's subsidiaries that ARE insurance companies -- like American General -- are all in excellent health and didn't need bailing out. Those subsidiaries that in the life insurance business, for example, are heavily regulated not by the federal government but by each of the 50 states (insurance is under state jurisdiction in our federation). And they kept a pretty good eye on what they were doing and they were healthy. But AIG -- the mother ship -- was involved in this activity of credit default swaps that was NOT an insurance activity, although as a hedge instrument it certainly acted like one. If credit swaps were pure insurance instruments, they would have been strictly overseen by the existing state insurance agencies. But because that activity was more of a federal thing, it was out of their purview. > > Now let's see you proffer a simple "I stand corrected" with regard to > legitimate global warming science and the fraudulent 'experts' you put > forward to deny its causes. I won't because I haven't seen a shred of evidence of catastrophic man- made global warming (CMMGW). Of course, even if there WERE such evidence, the next hurdle to overcome would be the one that Swedish environmentalist (sorry, I forget his name) always brings up and that is: even accepting the premise that there is CMMGW, the costs involved to combat it are not only cost-prohibitive but unnecessary. Unnecessary for a variety of reasons: 1) even doing everything Al Gore would have us, as Americans, do would not significantly lower the temperature; We'd spend trillions without getting much bang for our buck. 2) the Chinese and Indians -- about 2.5 billion all total today, much more in 20 years -- are not going to be denied their creature comforts by abiding by the strict rules set down by some fanciful, unproven notion of CMMGW. 3) why do away with the BENEFITS of global warming? There's alot of good that comes from CO2. So, I won't stand corrected because I don't think I'm incorrect. But you and all the rest of the believers in CMMGW should be hoping and praying that YOU will stand corrected because that would mean that our planet isn't going to explode like Krypton.
