US Politics Mega-thread - Page 613

On November 07 2013 14:20 sam!zdat wrote:


yeah, more finance

edit: anyway, I said "hoover up surplus-value" not "suck up surplus capital", which are completely and utterly different things, but let's not get too "philosophical" before bedtime

On November 07 2013 14:20 sam!zdat wrote:


yeah, more finance

edit: anyway, I said "hoover up surplus-value" not "suck up surplus capital", which are completely and utterly different things, but let's not get too "philosophical" before bedtime

On November 07 2013 14:32 IgnE wrote:


Their clients and the people they sold things to were in need of a bailout.

As to Abacus:


As for GS managing people's money, the fact that GS's profits have far outpaced the expected return for the average investor over the last 10 years shows you where their priorities lie.

On November 07 2013 14:37 sam!zdat wrote:
fine.

yeah, finance into more finance into more finance, all of which is a big rent-seeking machine which taxes the economy circumvents the state monopoly on the printing of money. the precession of the simulacra. we're way past Arrighi's signal crisis and we're living through the terminal crisis as we speak

On November 07 2013 15:01 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

The state doesn't have a monopoly on printing money. That's not the monetary system we have, and it has good and bad trade-offs.

On November 07 2013 14:59 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Yes, a lot of entities involved in MBS crashed and burned badly. But that's not because the MBS were particularly bad. The crisis happened because the MBS were something other than 100% perfectly safe and when small losses occurred huge leverage and short term funding lead to a disaster.

Like I said about abacus - there were disclosure issues. Your source says that GS lost money on it, so that may not be a case where GS "knew" the deal was junk.

GS isn't a mutual fund. What does the average investor's return have to do GS's profit growth?

On November 07 2013 15:06 sam!zdat wrote:


um.

who else gets to print money? I'm pretty sure you are not allowed to start issuing your own currency.

don't tell me the fed is not part of the state. the fed is part of the state

On November 07 2013 15:22 IgnE wrote:


Since when did GS stop offering mutual funds? You don't find it fishy when a bank makes more money on the financial products it sells than the investors who buy the products? Oh right, GS is just offering a service, and people can buy or not buy.

On November 07 2013 15:49 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Money isn't just currency. The Fed can create money, but cannot print currency.

On November 07 2013 08:18 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

What complaint is that?

On November 07 2013 16:05 sam!zdat wrote:


you're a lousy pedant. the fed orders currency from the treasury department, which prints it.

the fact remains that people who aren't the state aren't allowed to create money. except they do. increasingly so, as the sophistication of financial instruments increases. essentially what finance does is let you count money twice in time, once now, and once in the future, except that you can spend the future money now.

whether or not this is a good thing is, i suppose, an open question. but it's much more difficult for the state to regulate the money supply in world of computerized finance.

On November 07 2013 16:52 HunterX11 wrote:


Even aside from the undue political influence finance has had, finance has clearly reached a significant disconnect from the real economy. There are straightforward derivatives such as futures which have an actual value in connection to real, physical, things, such as managing risk for farmers, and then there more questionable instruments, such as securitizing mortgages in a manner so complex that literally no one is able to determine who has any legal right to be paid what, or credit default swaps which claim to allow people to hedge risk but only promise to pay out under conditions where they can't pay out. And the effects of the failure of the hyperreal financial economy spill over into the real economy, and things of real value are lost when the financial games don't work out.

When you have something like the meltdown of 2007 turning into a huge success for the right people, what incentive is there to prevent it from happening again, instead of encouraging it? Remember when people said the moral hazard of the LTCM bailout was just going to ensure it happened again, but next time on a larger scale? And that was 1998. Lord knows how bad it will be next time.

On November 07 2013 22:04 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

My point was that when the Fed creates money it's not necessarily creating physical currency:

+ Show Spoiler +

The broader point being that money isn't just physical currency and it can basically be created by making loans, depending on what definition of money you want to use.

So there isn't a single entity (central bank) or physical thing (gold) that has a hard lock on the amount of money out there.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is scheduled to serve as the keynote speaker at the "conservative dinner event of the year": the Florida Family Policy Council’s 8th Annual Policy Awards Dinner on Nov. 16.

The FFPC, a staunchly conservative nonprofit dedicated to promoting anti-gay and pro-life policies, is run by John Stemberger, an outspoken anti-gay activist who supports banning gays from participating in the Boy Scouts.

The fundraiser will honor former Seventh Day Adventist pastor Mathew Staver, the founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, a non-profit litigation firm and Christian ministry that is “advancing the family” through anti-gay lawsuits and “advancing the sanctity of human life” by supporting anti-abortion legislation.

Rubio, a likely 2016 Republican contender for president, strongly opposes Roe v. Wade and supports a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

In June, the conservative senator from Florida threatened on the Andrea Tantaros Show to abandon his own bill on comprehensive immigration reform "if this bill has something in it that gives gay couples immigration rights and so forth."

"It kills the bill. I'm done ... it shouldn't happen," Rubio said on the show.

Rubio has been ramping up public appearances recently, promoting his "Christian" values and the American dream.

WASHINGTON -- WASHINGTON (AP) — Heart-clogging trans fats have been slowly disappearing from grocery aisles and restaurant menus in the last decade. Now, the Food and Drug Administration is finishing the job.

The FDA plans to announce later Thursday that it will require the food industry to gradually phase out all trans fats, saying they are a threat to people's health. Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the move could prevent 20,000 heart attacks a year and 7,000 deaths.

Hamburg said that while the amount of trans fats in the country's diet has declined dramatically in the last decade, they "remain an area of significant public health concern." The trans fats have long been criticized by nutritionists, and New York and other local governments have banned them.

The agency isn't yet setting a timeline for the phase-out, but will collect comments for two months before officials determine how long it will take. Different foods may have different timelines, depending how easy it is to substitute.

"We want to do it in a way that doesn't unduly disrupt markets," says Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods. Still, he says, "industry has demonstrated that it is by and large feasible to do."

To phase them out, the FDA said it had made a preliminary determination that trans fats no longer fall in the agency's "generally recognized as safe" category, which is reserved for thousands of additives that manufacturers can add to foods without FDA review. Once trans fats are off the list, anyone who wants to use them would have to petition the agency for a regulation allowing it, and that would be unlikely to be approved.

Trans fat is widely considered the worst kind for your heart, even worse than saturated fat, which can also contribute to heart disease. Trans fats are used both in processed food and in restaurants, often to improve the texture, shelf life or flavor of foods. They are created when hydrogen is added to vegetable oil to make it more solid, which is why they are often called partially hydrogenated oils.

WASHINGTON -- The federal government shutdown that lasted for 16 days last month is expected to cost the U.S. economy between $2 billion and $6 billion in economic output, according to a report by the Office of Management and Budget released Thursday afternoon.

Those figures, culled from independent forecasters, may be a conservative estimate, the authors note. They found that approximately 120,000 fewer private sector jobs were created during the first two weeks of October because of the dual threats of the shutdown and the standoff over the debt ceiling. Forecasters additionally expect fourth quarter real GDP growth to be 0.2 to 0.6 percent lower than what it could have been had the shutdown and debt ceiling fight not taken place.

The report provides the most detailed insight to date into how much damage the shutdown caused. Among the notable findings are the fact that federal employees were furloughed during the shutdown for a combined total of 6.6 million days, and they received $2.0 billion in back pay for work that they never performed. The country's national parks lost roughly $500 million in visitor spending nationwide, while almost $4 billion in tax refunds were delayed because the Internal Revenue Service was shuttered.

On November 07 2013 15:06 sam!zdat wrote:


um.

who else gets to print money? I'm pretty sure you are not allowed to start issuing your own currency.

don't tell me the fed is not part of the state. the fed is part of the state

On November 08 2013 05:50 WhiteDog wrote:

They're destroyed as soon as there are transactions between banks, because it force them to use central money. Their capacity to create scriptural money is directly linked to the supply of central money and to the tendency of people to use central money.