US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1534

Rejecting a request by Florida's attorney general to maintain a judge's stay that would have kept same-sex couples from marrying in the state, the Supreme Court cleared the way for gay marriages to be held in Florida next month.

The stay stems from a ruling by U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle, who said in August that Florida's 2008 ban is unconstitutional.

As has happened with many similar cases, Judge Hinkle issued a stay on his own ruling that Florida's ban was illegal, to give the state time to appeal. That stay is set to expire on Jan. 5.

Things heated back up this week, after Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi filed a request with Justice Clarence Thomas, who oversees the 11th Circuit, asking him to maintain the stay.

The ACLU of Florida responded to Thomas' request for a plaintiffs' response yesterday, saying, "Florida cannot continue to deny fundamental rights to certain groups of people simply because it has done so in the past."

On December 20 2014 10:53 oneofthem wrote:
it exists because it makes money for the money managers and network effect controllers.

On December 20 2014 10:14 Sub40APM wrote:

Are you purposefully being dense here? Subprime's impact on the wider economy flowed through derivatives.

On December 20 2014 10:42 ticklishmusic wrote:


Err... subprime mortgages were bundled into mortgage backed securities (aka, derivatives) with a few prime mortgages, so basically adding kool aid powder to everclear (hint: it still tastes awful and will mess you up and yes I'm in college). Theory was that houses were good collateral, but turns out collateral is only worth something if 1. someone actually wants to buy it and 2. its not insanely overpriced. Basically if you drank the kool aid, you're fucked either way eventually.

I personally don't understand why "high finance" and investment banking exist since return is effectively a risk premium so it's not actually possible to beat the market. This recent article kinda outlines my view.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2014/12/16/a-black-hole-for-our-best-and-brightest/?hpid=z4

On another note, Obama is having one of the best weeks (or couple weeks) of his presidency. The timing suggests that God has a sense of humor.

On December 20 2014 12:06 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Subprime's effect on the wider economy flowed in a number of ways. The main one was through a run on the money markets.


I wouldn't call a standard MBS a derivative, unless we're talking a synthetic. To my knowledge the provision just pushes out commodity derivatives, equity derivatives and un-cleared CDS so regardless of the definition I don't think they apply to this.

MBS worked pretty well btw. Most AAA tranches performed fine (low default rate), and a lot of the losses were due to the market price tanking after liquidity dried up and mark to market rules or for those holding junior / equity tranches.

On December 20 2014 12:58 oneofthem wrote:
but AAA isn't supposed to default, and defaulting on these tranches muddles everyone's books because they literally don't know which tranch will be paid out first and so on. the rating was horseshit

On December 20 2014 13:49 Sub40APM wrote:

AAA by definition are not supposed to have any default rate, the service providers that were supposed ensure that were either inept/corrupt, the raters, or stupid, AIG and the monolines. The liquidity in the market dried up because as oneofthem said, when AAA turn into a big black box no financial institution could trust any other financial institution.

The Citirule was specifically created because retarded Citi pushed out all of its risk onto SPV when it was dancing around Tim Geithner asleep at the wheel and then took them back on its balance sheet once they realized their customers would never trust them again if they didnt.

On December 20 2014 12:06 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Subprime's effect on the wider economy flowed in a number of ways. The main one was through a run on the money markets.


I wouldn't call a standard MBS a derivative, unless we're talking a synthetic. To my knowledge the provision just pushes out commodity derivatives, equity derivatives and un-cleared CDS so regardless of the definition I don't think they apply to this.

MBS worked pretty well btw. Most AAA tranches performed fine (low default rate), and a lot of the losses were due to the market price tanking after liquidity dried up and mark to market rules or for those holding junior / equity tranches.

On December 20 2014 14:07 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Nothing is 'supposed to' default. AAA does not mean zero risk. There's a hierarchy for tranches, so you do know who gets paid out first, and so on.

On December 20 2014 14:22 oneofthem wrote:

...really now. you don't think the default rate on those AAA assets were out of the ordinary. yes, there was hierarchy for tranches, that's why they are derivative tranches, but the rating, the information, was fucked, or at the very least, the perceived reliability of that info was fucked, and liquidity did dry up.

On December 20 2014 14:41 oneofthem wrote:
i'm not really sure what you are trying to argue for here. the crisis happened, and the MBS derivatives system was the center of it. your point seems to be that the AAA ones were actually not that bad, but that's not really the issue is it. the issue is that they were seen as very good and the system's leverage and interconnection made it very sensitive to a mispricing/misinformation event.

On December 20 2014 10:28 IgnE wrote:


I honestly don't really know that much about Warren or what she's done. Besides the silly heritage thing what else do you find to be a serious character defect? I'm honestly curious. It can't just be that she has views that aren't the same as yours. Is there something seriously suspect with her? Or you just think she expresses those views in stupid ways?

On December 20 2014 07:55 Sub40APM wrote:

Tim Geithner is just mad she brought to attention his golden parachute in private equity after 10 years of loyal service to Wall Street. But the fact that people like him are Democrats is just strong evidence that Reagan Republicans who arent homophobic are Rubin Democrats. Which is what Clinton and Obama are.

On December 21 2014 00:37 oneofthem wrote:
while finance isn't all that productive it's not really the problem wtih the economy. erosion of middle class income and thus demand is ongoing and will continue.

is financialization contributing to this, yes. but, a country without this financialization in terms of high financial technology hijinks has even more problems (china), so the complexity or whatnot of the finance is not it. it's a more basic problem with idle capital chasing idle returns, often ending up in rent generation/protection or pure speculation.

i like a guy like bloomberg because he seems very policy oriented and realistic and can form a broad coalition with republicans to work the tough issues like tax reform. city mayors can be effective administrators compared to congressional level politicians.

On December 20 2014 15:15 GreenHorizons wrote:
What's great is that such a tiny fraction of the voting public has any clue what half of the terms mean, let alone how the instruments actually function, that the vast majority of voters have pretty much no chance of making an informed decision for who would represent a quality position on the subject. So either side of most financial market related arguments are being voted on by representatives (who usually also don't have a clue what they are talking about) who are elected by people who understand the issues even less, on legislation written by the businesses that are trying to be reigned in.

It's not really unique to financially related arguments but the distance between the professionals and a lay person/representative+the internet seems greater there than most places in relation to how they effect the average person's life.

An example of the other side of the extreme may be drug policy, where your average person is probably as informed or more so than an average representative, and many 'regular folk' have a better and more thorough understanding than many professionals in the field. This used to be extremely prevalent in the rehab field.

On December 21 2014 03:22 ticklishmusic wrote:


I mean, you'd think some of these people who get paid to make decisions would google or use wikipedia (or in this case, investopedia) to figure out how some of these things work. If I have to do it for my homework, you can do it for your job as part of the legislative body of the United States of America.