Subscribe to ourmailing list
Subscribe to this blog's feed
« 2009 Ontario budget includes tax cuts. | Main | We might be contradictory, but at least we're not backpeddling! »
South Park reveals all:
(h/t Andrew Sullivan)
Posted by Kalim Kassam on March 27, 2009 | Permalink
I thought is was their white skin and blue eyes, though I have to confess I don't see many Johnson's and Smith's and McKendry's at the Fed Reserve or on Wall Street for that matter (Wolfe wrote about this in Bonfire of the Vanities, how odd it was for someone named McCoy to be working on Wall Street):
"Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Thursday blamed the global economic crisis on “white people with blue eyes” and said it was wrong that black and indigenous people should pay for white people’s mistakes.
Speaking in Brasília at a joint press conference with Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, Mr Lula da Silva told reporters: “This crisis was caused by the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ae4957e8-1a5f-11de-9f91-0000779fd2ac,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2Fae4957e8-1a5f-11de-9f91-0000779fd2ac.html%3Fnclick_check%3D1&_i_referer=&nclick_check=1
This is a great opportunity for immigrants who came to Canada under multiculturalism - another genius blue eyed white man idea - to show their appreciation and speak up for us, instead of the other way around, for once. In a multiracial country like Brazil, the president - who has a fourth grade education by the way - may have just started an ethnic civil war. It would be wise to nip this in the bud.
Posted by: Some White Guy | 2009-03-27 8:26:43 AM
White Guy, this song written in 2005 by goldbug and financial analyst Max Keiser predicted many details of the financial collapse and laid the blame squarely on "Whitey [who] racked up 250 trillion dollars worth of debts."
Posted by: Kalim Kassam | 2009-03-27 8:34:04 AM
White Guy, this song written in 2005 by goldbug and financial analyst Max Keiser predicted many details of the financial collapse and laid the blame squarely on "Whitey [who] racked up 250 trillion dollars worth of debts." Posted by: Kalim Kassam | 2009-03-27 8:34:04 AM
Max Keiser also created a hedge fund called Karmabanque which was specifically set up to short companies he considered not "environmentally" friendly. He then went on a campaign to encourage eco-activists to boycott those companies products. The eco-activists didn't know that his hedge fund was shorting the stocks of the companies he was encouraging them to boycott. Keiser isn't the most credible financial commentator around.
Posted by: The Stig | 2009-03-27 8:54:10 AM
Stig,
Let it not be said that Keiser is an uninteresting chap. I particularly appreciate how his voice turns all screechy when he's getting worked up on TV.
Posted by: Kalim Kassam | 2009-03-27 9:00:10 AM
Well the primary cause of the collapse was the state encouraging and in some cases forcing banks to make subprime mortgage loans to minorities who didn't qualify for them, a fact the WS should be making more of an issue of.
The minorities end up with a house, and an overvalued one at that, the bankers make out like bandits as usual; where does whitey get his cut? Stock market? Er, no. Mortgage help? Nope, not if you have a job and paid your bills on time. Who's going to pay for the bailout? Mostly white taxpayers.
It would be nice if some of the ethnics we invited to our country showed their gratitude by helping us on this one. I have blue eyes, and know the start of a genocide when I see one.
TY for the tips btw Kalim and Stig, that's what I am talking about.
Posted by: Some White Guy | 2009-03-27 9:37:13 AM
Some White Guy,
So where did all the money that created the bubble come from? I agree that the gov't directed that money into real estate, but the money had to come from somewhere. And it wasn't just ethnics that received money.
As for this Keiser guy, he sounds more like a Marxist than anything else. Perhaps I am wrong. His take on derivatives is certainly simplistic. You can't simply add up the value of all derivative products and divide by GDP ... that's just ignorant or manipulative (or both). There is nothing fundamentally wrong with derivative products. The real problem is the asset that these products derive their value from.
Posted by: Charles | 2009-03-27 9:43:40 AM
Oh ... and blaming Whitey is just stupid. The Central Bank of Japan flooded trillions into the system as well. Anyone ever heard of the carry trade? Are we going to make racist statements blaming men with black hair and almond-shaped eyes as well?
Posted by: Charles | 2009-03-27 9:47:02 AM
White Guy,
I don't place primary fault for the housing bubble and financial collapse on the minority groups' mau-mauing and the state's legislating to force banks to make bad loans (though I have mentioned it as an important contributing and more proximate cause), but rather with distortions resulting from excessive availability of money and credit (itself the result of easy money policies by the US Federal Reserve and perhaps also an Asian savings glut). In my writings on the economy, I have therefore tried to emphasize what I view as the root causes of the problem more than other factors such as forced lending, moral hazard from bailouts and insurance, or government sponsored enterprises which shaped the precise form that the problems took.
Posted by: Kalim Kassam | 2009-03-27 10:00:31 AM
Kalim,
As much as I enjoy and respect your writings on economics, I respectfully submit you are severely handicapped by being a Canadian citizen in Canada subject to the Criminal Code and various and sundry HRC provisions. You live in a country which sentenced a man to a full 9 months in prison for criticizing multiculturalism on the internet. Accordingly, on any subject that touches on race I defer to Americans.
Such as Steve Sailer: "Last Thursday, though, I found an eye-opening graph of cumulative Community Reinvestment Act promises by banks from 1977 through 2005. According to the September 2005 report CRA Commitments by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), which bills itself as "the nation's economic justice trade association of 600 community associations:”
As the chart below shows, $4.2 trillion in CRA dollars was committed from 1992 through 2005. In contrast, $8.8 billion was negotiated from 1977 through 1991.
When measured in terabucks, the Community Reinvestment Act was negligible until the 1990s. And it was still small potatoes until the Clinton “reforms” of 1995 and the rise of well-organized pressure groups of the kind affiliated with the NCRC. But the biggest flood of CRA assurances came during the presidency of George W. Bush, who repeatedly called in 2002-2004 for 5.5 million more minority homeowners by 2010. Cumulative bank pledges (typically doled out over ten years) grew from $1.85 trillion in 2002 to $4.20 trillion in 2004.
Indeed, total CRA commitments increased by $1.63 trillion in 2004 alone, the first year of the Housing Bubble."
It's a slam dunk case with a paper trail: this was a diversity recession caused by Bush the Great Socialist's policy of increasing minority home ownership. There's more, a lot more, to back that up, stuff like: "In U.S. counties where Hispanics account for more than 25% of the population, banks have taken back 6.7 homes per 1,000 residents since Jan. 1, 2006, compared with 4.6 per 1,000 residents in all counties, according to a Journal analysis of U.S. Census and RealtyTrac data."
and
"Back in October, my reader Tino calculated from the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database that minorities got half the subprime cash (for home purchases and refinancings) handed out in the big years of 2004-2007. Mortgage dollars (prime and subprime) for home purchases leant to Hispanics went up 691% from 1999 to 2006 and 397% for blacks (but only 218% for Asians and about 100% for whites). In other words, mortgage lending to Hispanics almost octupled from 1999 to the peak of the Housing Bubble in 2006. Thus, a sizable majority of defaulted dollars lost are in just four heavily Hispanic states: California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida (what Wall Street called the "Sand States").
But, what about foreclosure rates by race?
Black Hispanic White Black / White Hisp / White 1998 8.5% 7.1% 4.1% 2.1 1.7 1999 9.2% 5.1% 2.5% 3.7 2.0 2000 8.1% 8.1% 5.4% 1.5 1.5 2001 8.7% 8.3% 5.2% 1.7 1.6 2002 8.9% 6.2% 4.8% 1.9 1.3 2003 8.6% 6.6% 5.1% 1.7 1.3 2004 12.9% 10.4% 6.6% 2.0 1.6 2005 15.0% 10.3% 6.5% 2.3 1.6 2006 10.2% 6.8% 4.1% 2.5 1.7 http://isteve.blogspot.com/search/label/Diversity%20Depression
Give it a read, I don't think it's up for debate, I've rarely seen so much economic data backing up a point. There was a deliberate policy decision to increase minority home ownership regardless of cost; that didn't just cause the bubble, it was the bubble.
Posted by: Some White Guy | 2009-03-27 2:33:14 PM
White Guy, I have read "Diversity Depression" and think Sailer makes a compelling case -- that's why I linked to him in the post I mentioned above.
That the boom took the form of a housing bubble was due to a number of policies including the sort that Sailer discusses. On that point I do not disagree, instead I am asserting that even without them the same low-interest loose-credit monetary policy would have fueled some sort of unsustainable boom which would be followed inevitably by a bust. The housing policies, thought they were detrimental and misallocated resources were not sufficient to create the sort of systemic distortions characteristic of business cycles.
Posted by: Kalim Kassam | 2009-03-27 3:00:04 PM
And here I thought the bail out process was very simple. I had NO idea it was THAT scientific! ;)
Posted by: JC | 2009-03-27 3:48:23 PM
The Taxpayers will rescue the "free market." You gotta love those "Public, Private Partnerships!"
An Ecstatic Money Man and a “Bad Bank” By Stephen J. Gray
An emergency meeting has been called by a powerful money man to break the good news to his cohorts about more financial help from taxpayers. The meeting opens:
“Thank you all for coming at this short notice. I have great financial news. This news is even better than all the billions or trillions we have received in bailout money of taxpayers' dollars. It has been reported that the government will create a new financial entity with taxpayers' dollars called a 'bad bank.' This bank will buy up all the rotten, lousy, useless paper we called 'derivatives' that we have on our books, so make sure you get rid of all your crap, oops, I mean 'troubled assets.' This means the taxpayers are going to bat for us once again; so take advantage of it. Even though some of us made massive profits and received huge fees for selling these 'derivatives' all over the place, the taxpayers are now going to be owners of the 'bad bank.' Whoever thought that name up is surely right on the money. No pun intended, of course. [Much laughter ensues] And, the way things are going nowadays, perhaps a Nobel Prize for Economics could be in the offing for the inventor of the "bad bank" terminology? But hey, it’s all in the packaging as we all know."
[Some applause takes place and there is more laughter as someone says: “Thank goodness there is a financial Tooth Fairy out there.”]
“Anyway, that’s how we sold all this financial garbage in the first place. We used names like 'super investment vehicles' and 'collaterized debt obligations' and they surely sounded good, even though they turned out to be crap. And this is the type of crap, oops, I mean assets, the taxpayers are now paying for. But hey, where would the taxpayers be without us? After all, we will still be lending them money from their own money and charging them a fee for the service. Now isn’t that good business? But I digress.
“To put the ‘bad bank’ terminology in perspective, here is how I understand it will work. Some of us who have been bailed out by billions or trillions of taxpayers' dollars will now be able to sell our rotten, useless, lousy paper, that nobody in their right mind will buy, to this ‘bad bank.’ This ‘bad bank’ will then give us taxpayers' dollars for our lousy, useless paper. The ‘bad bank’ will then ask investors to sell this rotten, lousy, useless paper called 'derivatives,' and they will receive big fees for doing so. The government will lend these 'investors' huge amounts of taxpayers' monies to buy this toxic garbage, oops I mean ‘ troubled assets.’ The government will also hire some financial firms to facilitate this movement of crap, oops I mean ’troubled assets.’ Some cynical people are saying this crap, oops, I mean assets, is financial toilet paper and should be flushed away. But at least we are flush again thanks to the taxpayers--and it was all done within the free market system. It's a great example of ‘public, private partnerships,’ I would say, and a victory for free market forces everywhere.
“Still, there is some negativity out there and much criticism of us. But we must not stoop to the level of our critics; we must rise above it all and take the high road. Without our expertise, governments could not function properly. After all, who advises them but us? And who gives some politicians jobs when their careers are over? Us, of course! And who lends the people their own money? Us of course!
[A thunderous wave of applause ensues and there is much cheering and back-slapping amongst the assembled money men.]
"I will close now my friends, but I must say that I am ecstatic about the ‘bad bank’ idea. The taxpayers are now its bankers and God help, oops I mean bless, the taxpayers. ”
[A standing ovation ensues and some voices are heard shouting, "Public private partnerships have saved the free market system!”]
Stephen J. Gray March 23, 2009 http://graysinfo.blogspot.com
Posted by: Stephen J. Gray | 2009-03-27 3:59:22 PM
I'll have to see some numbers before I remain convinced of your explanation Kalim, but knowing your writing is at least informed by Sailer, who has done impressive research on this, puts you ahead of 99% of the rest of the pack on the matter IMHO, which is good enough for me. Cheers.
Posted by: Some White Guy | 2009-03-27 7:03:34 PM
Stephen J. Gray
Excellent
Posted by: peterj | 2009-03-27 10:36:25 PM
The comments to this entry are closed.
