Wow, or Yikes... quite a post. Tanta, they need to modify the 50's hit for you, to... "You write too much, you worry me to death, you write too much you even worry my pet..."
These people are looking for and getting revenge. It's not new, as you pointed out.
There was an angry seller (in the 80s) I knew of who ripped all the copper wiring out at the last minute. Buyer didn't notice, damage not visible, until he was gone.
A foreclosee in the mid 80s who had ripped out the entire inside of the house, not just punched in some drywall. I saw pictures. It was amazing.
A guy in the 90s who also ripped out the entire inside of the house. Not mad at the lender, mad at the world; he died of AIDS. Also, he was a decorator, so there is some thought he intended to fix it up again.
in the early 2000s, to get down to the silly, a client asked me if she could replace her fancy Mexican hand-painted drawer knobs in her bathroom, and another who wanted to take down hunter fans & put up cheap ones. I said you're on your own. She did take the knobs and nobody said anything. The original fans were left at my urging.
I imagine ripping things up is very satisfying to a certain type of person.
Also, the banks are letting more houses rot, than are being destroyed by angry borrowers. I personally know of several, and I'm sure Cobra Driver could tell us of many.
The problem is that these whiners (both reckless borrowers and foolish lenders) are DEMANDING that society as a whole bail them out. In fact, that process is underway...I am getting hit as a taxpayer and in my dollar savings. So I have an emotional, unsympathetic reaction-- NO BAILOUT for the jerks on Wall Street and their deadbeat borrower partners in crime.
--
"However, I for one did argue, quite early in this mess, that 1) housing policy is political in this country and 2) financial crises are even more so and that therefore 3) whether or not it "should" be that way is immaterial; it is so. The housing bust and the debt bubble pop have been and are going to remain political footballs for the foreseeable future."
Dear Tanta,
This mess was turned into a criminal (I mean unethical to the limit) activity fully supported, or encouraged, by the Fed and the USG for the benefit of business groups (Hopebuilders, Bankrupters, Fraudsters, etc) and at the full expense of the American People, in general.
That must inform you as to what kind of econo-political system we do have (not the fantasy version you were taught as a child). It is as corrupt as any in the world today. In a bad system bad practices are the norm.
People hate it when they find out they have been had. The ponzi economy sucked a lot of lower income people in and made them think they too could join the world of the rich and famous. There is a bitterness building that will have dark implications in the future. Tanta scores again!
Sorry, this is off topic, but i didn't know you were also working as a medical transcriptionist...
Wow. I don't actually have any holes in my keys yet. Maybe I don't try hard enough.
Actually I have this terrible habit of curling my right hand into a fist and literally banging on the "enter" key (the one on the far right, on the number pad). It comes from those years of using a ten-key desktop calculator and, well, having an increasing sense of doom and/or rage growing in you as you see the running total rising or falling. By the time you get to "grand total" and that "enter" key, it's Hostility time.
So my "enter" key is in bad shape, but I haven't melted it yet. Good heavens.
With "Mark to Market" and "Jas Jain" coming in at less than 20 minutes on a post that tries to get the mean-spirited and the terminally humorless to stop for a minute and think about it, I believe we have just set some kind of internet record.
Does anyone know how you get in touch with the Guiness Book of Blog Records?
I suppose I could write you a loan that involved my promising to hand over an asset that I already owned to myself--that'll teach me!--in the event that you fail to pay me back as agreed.
When I fail to meet my annual savings goal, I have to fine myself! Works every time.
You might consider it a kind of performance art of the gallows-humor subgenre.
Without this mess creating big economic boom in 2003, led by emergency Fed Funds Rate policy," Greenspan would not have been reappointed in June 2004, Bush would not have been re-elected in late 2004, and Bernanke would not be the Fed Chairman today.
So, you can see where the impetus for this mess came from. It is very important to understand the root causes. I call this era in American history as the Rule of the Evildoers
Anybody sold any "scrap" metal lately? Aluminum cans are bringing $.50/lb, but thats chicken scratch compared to aluminum wire and copper of any type! Copper plumbing pipe fetches close to $1.80/lb, and pipe is dense and heavy. Maybe those people "trashing" the 'ol homestead are just taking their equity with them.
Now, now. It will do no good to repost that one. If they didn't get it then, they'll fail to get it again. And that way lies the only laugh I'm likely to get today.
Hear on a podcast the other day that up to 40% of the growth in home ownership since 2000 was from immigration. Imagine that you've managed to get over here, bought your piece of the American dream and then had it "snatched away from you". Especially after everybody and his brother (and TV and radio) has been telling you how smart you were to sign on that dotted line....
Reckon I'd feel like I'd been shafted, be pretty bitter and want to do some damage, too.
Well, it is leagally crime to destroy and/or damage the property intentionally during BK.
Though the banks dont persue this people now, there comes time when banks will go after this peple for the damage. This damage cant be wiped out by BK.
In otherwords, very soon I do expect some startup company to come forward and video tape the entire house/condo before the owner vacates.
Then they will ask the banks to share the profit with them from the money they will be persuing from the vandelizers legally.
For banks, any money from this way is profit and they would let third party to do this.
It is only the matter of how many incidents it happens to reach critical mass.
It is dangerous for the people who have non-recourse loan and vandelize than the people who have recourse loan.
Simple, the non-recourse people has more money which they haven't spent on paying their loans.
Also the people who has recourse-loans will have a lien held on their future income.
Guys, for heven sake dont be stupid to damage the properties when u leave. It is easy to escape during boom than during bust.
In the bust I saw in the 80's entire subdivisions were trashed and then sold for 17 cents on the dollar there is nothing new here and this is what I would have expected. Human nature never changes.
The humor I see is irony. The investment and commercial banks made out like bandits from the dot.com boom. They got overconfident in their own schemes and now they reap the rewards. It's the same joke as the man who logically proves that God doesn't exist because of the creation of the Babelfish (Babel fish) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
although i do fear that that was an intentional spelling given the sentence it happens to be in, Tanta's nerdiness, and the title of the post.
No, it wasn't. And the sad part is that I actually did remember to run the spell-checker. I think I just didn't click my mouse hard enough on the correct choice. For someone whose reputation for banging hard on keyboards is well-established, that might be kinda funny. But if so, the joke's on me.
(Relying on a spell-checker, which I usually refuse to do, is how I got an "I" when I needed an "a" in another part of the post. "I" is, of course, spelled correctly.)
Nemo, I don't know if Bill Strunk ever did catch on to the . . . irony . . . of making "rules" for "good writing" that require all good writing to be of the same kind.
I don't actually care, either. The tyranny of the Strunk-worshippers is way past its sell-by date, and ridicule is the kindest thing we can heap on it.
Once upon a time, in a land far away, there were multiple styles and genres and conventions of discourse. A famous one was called "baroque." (No, really. Look it up.) It went out of fashion as an earnest discursive style, not coincidentally when the precursors of the Strunk-tyrants decided that everyone had to go for lean and mean and stripped-down in order to flatter their own desires to legislate aesthetics as well as morality.
After a while, of course, the baroque resurfaced as a tool wielded--hopefully with the i and the e in the right place--by the subversive-minded who have pretty much had it with pedestrian thinkers and aesthetic amateurs bonking us over the knuckles with a copy of The Elements of Style.
A moral could, in fact, be extracted from the story. Like, don't mess with someone who has read Sir Thomas Browne.
Now, S N up there at 10:19 is pretty funny. Borat does economics? Or just some garden-variety nitwit who fails to understand "risk" and "property rights"? It's so deliciously undecidable. Paging Dr. Heisenberg!
Without this mess creating big economic boom in 2003, led by emergency Fed Funds Rate policy," Greenspan would not have been reappointed in June 2004, Bush would not have been re-elected in late 2004, and Bernanke would not be the Fed Chairman today.""
Jas, the 2004 election was 'crookeder' than my dog's hind leg. Just like the 2000 'selection.' The folks in the US aren't as dumb as they seem.
They begin to grasp that they had only ever been given a short-term lease on the "American Dream," not a piece of the "ownership society" pie.
Um, no. What they were given was an opportunity that they abused by buying something they could not afford, because they hoped it would make them wealthy.
I have no sympathy for these people, and neither should anybody else. This is not about making jokes or making fun of anybody. This is about the political question of whether it is reasonable, sane, or fair to spend so much as a penny of taxpayer money bailing these speculators out. (Yes, buying a house you could never afford makes you a "speculator".)
So sure, let's reward everybody who got greedy at the expense of those who saved responsibly. Oh wait, that sounds insane, so to make it politically feasible you first have to paint the greedy as "victims", and write long screeds decrying how they are being "made fun of" by all the mean self-absorbed taxpayers.
Yes, somehow, we have to get from "greedy person now engaging in petty vandalism" to "victim". This is impossible to do succinctly, so we wind up with twelve paragraphs...
Tanta, I LOVE YOU. You "get it" and your brain power shows a clean heart. Please..., Can you be my President? I hope someday more people like you are entrusted to lead the rest of us into a world of collective awareness and a healthy pursuit of equilibrium.
Maybe, I am too much an idealist. But the reality is that we need to change our ways for the better of all.
Is "Trash Out Refinancing" another Tanta original? I don't recall seeing it before. I think i've learned more new words and phrases on this blog than I did studying for the SAT's (still remember "miasma", the rest are long gone)
In any society, there are always those who aren't as smart and/or lucky as others. A sane society doesn't try to cheat its most vulnerable members.
Hysterian | 03.30.08 - 10:24 am | #
The problem is there is no 100% sane society.
Is it just me, or is there some confusion as to when a 'trash out' has occurred?
Is this leaving behind a lot of junk or unwanted stuff, especially when you have a house full of said stuff and have to move, um, quickly?
Was this done by the homeowners or by someone to whom they had rented the house before it was foreclosed?
They use the term 'tenant', after all.
Does this also encompass vandalism by burglers and such who ransack an abandoned house or use it to party, etc?
You still have a trashed house at the end, but causes and effects are still important when trying to evaluate the problem, especially when some are using this to moralize.
One thing I loved about 70s vintage NPR All Things Considered was the programmers' willingness to devote fifteen or twenty minutes to a topic if it took that long to flesh out the tale or to talk with people who could help debunk some commonly held view in serious need of attention.
Is "Trash Out Refinancing" another Tanta original?
I don't think I made that up. But at a certain point it becomes hard to tell. Is there a kind of crypto-cryptamnesia? Forgetting that you actually made something up by rememebering falsely that you read it somewhere else? If there isn't, can I patent it?
I think the phrase "trash out" gets used a lot. I am willing to take credit for trying to work out the implications of the pun "trash out refinance." Using literally "brute force" to "re-write" the terms of the loan. But I'll defer to anyone who beat me to that.
Nemo, do you really not get that somebody can be victimizer and victim at that same time? That's it's downright common for victimizers to be or to have been victims?
So, you have a society which contains significant percentages of people who believe that:
The Rapture is coming. They are entitled. The sq. footage of your house is an indicator of your status and success. I've got a 4,000 sq. foot "winkie!" How about you? Ah, such a little guy. Well, some women love landscapping.
You have an undercurrent of resentment. Especially by white people who because of demographics are feeling endangered. Then, add the "Mad Max" wannabees who sit at home playing with their Glocks.
To keep this short we are on the way to having a large population who feels "It was stabbed in the back." This is not going to lead to flowers in the hair and really good bands.
I feel trashed out by all this mortgage meltdown, financial crisis, subprime, no down payment ARM reset, monoline, hedge fund, MBS, no doc loan, fraudoorall
Shorter Nemo: You need to take out all of the parts of the post that aren't validating my point of view. It would make more sense to me that way.
Well, at least that was concise.
Now let me see...
Paragraphs 1-4: Long description of what you are not going to discuss.
Paragraphs 5-6: Introduction
Paragraphs 7-11: People took out loans to buy houses "at cost" with no down payment. Now they are mad because everybody who said they were being stupid are turning out to be right.
Paragraphs 12-13: Anyone who says he "have no sympathy" is overestimating the importance of his own feelings.
Paragraphs 14-15: Actually, he is really trying to make fun of the poor victim borrowers, in an attempt to prevent right-wing "free market" economists (the real villains) from looking stupid for advocating all this "Ponzi finance" in the first place.
Paragraphs 16-19: Being the butt of jokes makes the poor victims want to trash the bank's house.
OK, I think I get your point.
And mine is that you are seriously misunderstanding -- or just misrepresenting -- what people like me are thinking when we say "I have no sympathy".
P.S. I hope the vandals see jail time. Now THAT would be funny.
Is it just me, or is there some confusion as to when a 'trash out' has occurred?
I'm not in the mood to call it "confusion" today. I'm in the mood to call it willful failure to recognize that we are interpreting this humorless thing called "reality," not simply recording it like a good camera.
Of course these things are often "undecidable." As Fair Economist notes, terms like "victim" and "victimizer" are a bit slippery, too. That real world does have a stubborn way of making hash out of our more simple-minded pronunciamentos about it. (No. Really. Sometimes nice guys finish first. The world can always surprise you if you're an idiot.)
The big problem with The Elements of Style, besides the monumental hubris of thinking there is only one "style," is the equally monumental delusion that everyone is trying to write about something that can be stated in six words or less.
A former professor of mine kept a poster on his wall that said, "Any philosophy that can fit in a nutshell belongs there." Words of wisdom.
What I also "get" is that here you have a classic example of where the rush to start making a list of people you don't have any "sympathy" for gets you: nowhere, fast
A long list of lack-of-sympathy gets you to Glibertarian Land, of which McCardle is the reigning media queen.
As a left libertarian, right libertarians strike me quite like the bolsheviks struck the mensheviks; irreconcilable factions of radical movements as a rule simply detest each other, often more than members of more polar opposite movements.
I think the phrase "trash out" gets used a lot. I am willing to take credit for trying to work out the implications of the pun "trash out refinance." Using literally "brute force" to "re-write" the terms of the loan. But I'll defer to anyone who beat me to that.
google comes up < a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22trash-out+refinancing%22&btnG=Search">empty.
o, the joke's on me, who tried to buy a house in 05 and thought the things were just cwazee and decided to wait it out... looks like the bailout's not for me.
"I have no sympathy for these people, and neither should anybody else."
Really? Not even karmic prophylactic sympathy? Not even like, it's in my own self interest to cut a little slack to someone who misjudged his own margin of error in case I ever misjudge my own? Your reach never exceeded your grasp on anything? What a dour world you must inhabit.
I think we all should have sympathy for "these people." Even the speculators and the flip this property types. Even the young recently unemployed mba's. Didn't anyone ever describe to you what a breadline looks like? Or the spectacle of apple sellers hawking for their literal survival?
A little more sympathy, a little less self righteous holier-than-thou, and we might struggle through this mess and imagine how to avoid a similar one anytime soon.
Nemo, do you really not get that somebody can be victimizer and victim at that same time? That's it's downright common for victimizers to be or to have been victims?
Sure. But I do not believe foreclosed homeowners are "victims". I believe people are responsible for their own actions. (But then, I believe Bear Stearns should have been allowed to fail. Privatize the profits, privatize the losses...)
I object to any attempt to justify the actions of vandals on the grounds that they are just mad because the mean, heartless "conservatives" are "making fun of them".
Tanta could have started and ended with "Megan McArdle is an idiot". That would have been both shorter and completely uncontroversial. But Tanta went on to explain how she "understands" why someone would want to trash their house because of comments like Megan McArdle's. On that, I call BS.
I, like many people, fall prey to whether or not the "victim" is a "victim".
it clouds my understanding of what is, and what should be done.
and thus I've tried to separate arguments when I think of this topic, as I've found there are several DIFFERENT aspects to the idea.
1) is the victim a "victim"?
2) what should our response to this be?
as time has gone on I've realized that most of the time there really is no way to discern if the victim is a victim... it's pointless. often it seems to me that the victim is a victim, but also partially culpable nonetheless.
thus, I've found that I can have empathy with those involved (borrowers, tenants, lenders, investors, etc) without absolving them of their culpability in the situation.
but this line of reasoning may be separated from whether or not I have a fiduciary duty to help in their cause- EVEN THOUGH I understand fully that their cause directly affects me.
I believe it is possible to have empathy for those involved but still feel that I have no fiducicary duty to them.
so for the borrowers:
-give them legal address in court
-if they are destitute, give them the most basic of food and shelter (which is why Jesus created welfare and food banks and all that, and why I support those enterprises with my tax dollars and my votes.)
For the lenders/investors, etc
-give them legal address in court
-if they go BK based on all this, allow them the protections that Allah gave corporations in his wisdom.
as for the rest:
I don't agree with all the financial shenanigans being done to "save me" from "systemic risk" (that they ironically caused), so I'll pass on all that.
P.S. I hope the vandals see jail time. Now THAT would be funny.
Perfect example of how a mere sense of hostility masquerades as a sense of humor.
As someone who never appreciated slapstick in the slightest, I can see where you're coming from. There is certainly a tradition in this culture of finding the infliction of pain on others a big yuk. If you can drag out some hoary watered-down concept of "poetic justice" for something that is neither the one or the other, you can claim to be at least a middle-brow, not just the kind of low-brow who finds the Three Stooges a real scream and wants front-row tickets to the comeuppance of these people who are vandalizing their own property.
Scratch a libertarian and you get someone who really does want the government to interfere in property rights: at the point where your exercise of those rights might cost your corporate betters a repair invoice.
It is going one big scratch and claw show. Go ahead and be "holier than my cat." This is going to continue to get snowball* and many of those who thought they would be untouched will find themselves in the big litter box of life.
One of the things I like about Tanta's posts is that she never forgets that we are dealing with Human beings in all their absurdity and glory.This mess affects all of us,and there will be profound social changes due to this misallocation of resources and the anger of the people who have been had.Does anyone here think that there hasn't been literal "blood in he streets" already ?if only caused by someone in despair who got behind the wheel of a car after taking a few drinks? Or the retirees who thought their brokers put them in safe investments only to find out that they had better start taste testing cat food? more poor people crowded together mean more drug resistant TB...I have certainly made my share of disastrous financial decisions (My Marriage,now over)and I don't have any desire to blame the folks who bought into the big lie.I do think it is vital to understand the situation in order to mitigate the damage to our society,and to ensure that similar situations do not arise quickly.It will be interesting,and I intend to enjoy the more absurd and ironic aspects of the show,but it is about real people with real lives,and a LOT of very real pain for everyone.
do you have empathy (as opposed to sympathy) for these people (victim or not)?
and open question to Tanta:
is your ire as piqued against those of us who have empathy but not necessarily sympathy for these "victims"?
because I can CERTAINLY empathize with a lot of those deeply involved.
I can understand why the borrowers overextended themselves, why the loan officers approved the deals, why the securitizers passed the garbage through, why the ratings agencies did what they did, why the Fed looked the other way, and so on.
I DON'T necessarily sympathize with any of them. (depends on the exact situation, which is rarely if ever known to me).
Scratch a libertarian and you get someone who really does want the government to interfere in property rights: at the point where your exercise of those rights might cost your corporate betters a repair invoice.
Scratch a libertarian and you get someone who really does want the government to interfere in property rights: at the point where your exercise of those rights might cost your corporate betters a repair invoice.
Tanta, maybe you should try half-decaf. Libs advocate minimum government participation. Hardly the same thing. In fact you make a common mis-generalization of what zoning actually does. There is a voluntary exchange of land use rights. Accepting restrictions on your activities grants in turn a right to quiet enjoyment. It is only the recent decades when planners and municipalities started using planning as a blunt social agenda tool that the idea of zoning as restriction has taken hold.
Tanta, doesnt the mortgage contract contain a clause stating that "borrower shall keep the Property in good repair and shall not commit waste or permit impairment or deterioration of the Property."
Would you care to respond to any of my actual, you know, points?
No.
I dealt with the the only one worth comment. I have no intention of trying to deal with anyone who wants to diagram my sentences or outline my posts.
You are trying to get me to resolve the contraction. I am, as I mentioned in the post, trying to drag it out into the daylight and let it squirm for a while. One of us is never going to be happy here, and I think it should be you.
do you have empathy (as opposed to sympathy) for these people (victim or not)?
Yes, I understand how lots of people would be lured by the promise of getting rich for doing approximately nothing. And I understand how they could be mad when it doesn't work out and they lose a lot of money.
In other words, I have empathy in the same sense as I do for gamblers in Vegas. In a drunken stupor, I might even admit to a certain sympathy...
My beef comes when the politicos paint these people as "victims". Because I know what comes next.
Anonymous writes:
no, the joke's on me, who tried to buy a house in 05 and thought the things were just cwazee and decided to wait it out... looks like the bailout's not for me.
Me either, except that I bought an affordable house in an affordable neighborhood, so that I wouldn't ever have to go to sleep at night wondering if I could make the next mortgage payment.
It's tough to go in for the group hug
under the circumstances.
although I empathize with many of the parties, my brain rejects the attempt to overly-victimize them, for the sole reason that I fear that this victimization profile will be used in order to convince me that I must pony up more $$$ for their "cause".
and I sometimes get angry, because I fear/believe that this is exactly what is happening.
give us tales of woe about these poor borrowers so that we can create a taxpayer funded bailout of some sort.
give us tales of "hoocudanode" and "systemic risk will ruin you too" so that we agree to bail out those involved. Then try to convince us that the bailout went to the aformentioned sympathy-deserving victims, instead of where it really went: to the reckless corporations
and then when people start noticing that it was a bailout, say "well it wasn't really a bailout... you just don't understand these sorts of things."
(example: Bear Stearns. remind me again why $10/share wasn't a bailout? remind me again why their CEO just cashed out $60Million and how that's not a bailout?)
so I empathize of my own free will... but I reserve my sympathies for now...
Rob Dawg, at least two people on this thread have stated or implied that it should be illegal for people to destroy their own property.
What they mean, I must conclude, is that secured residential mortgage lending should be risk-free to lenders: you should be able to put someone into one of these "de facto lease" loans without having to risk them catching on and taking out the built-ins.
Well, there is no risk-free lunch, not even for lenders.
I should have said "glibertarian" instead of "libertarian." In any case I was aiming at someone whose grasp on this idea of the sanctity of property rights seems a touch weak.
Then again I am not a libertarian myself, at least not as the word is most typically used, so I'm probably capable of making the mistake of thinking y'all look alike. I mean, we're on the subject of making sweeping generalizations about people . . .
I have no intention of trying to deal with anyone who wants to diagram my sentences or outline my posts.
nah nah nah nah I can't hear you nah nah nah
One of us is never going to be happy here, and I think it should be you.
Actually, I am quite happy just having said my peace. I was curious if you had any rebuttal beyond name-calling. You have answered my question; thanks!
Absolutely wonderful distinction to make: we are all greedy little curs, but that need not keep us from criticizing that fact (with humor, natch!)
Tanta is a radical liberal (I do not mean that as an insult, merely a description) and hates high-and-mightiness, which I can empathize and even sympathize with. The problem with that outlook is that the high-and-mighty are often absolutely correct about what they are being high-and-mighty about, they are just guilty of another sin: pride. The aesthetics of the discussion simply dominate: prideful mothr fkers are just intolerable a**holes and we instinctively set our stance firmly against them.
It makes the point that we all should strive to understand the situation better before passing judgment. This is especially true for journalists, who have the power to influence others through the written word.
Tanta writes:
Scratch a libertarian and you get someone who really does want the government to interfere in property rights: at the point where your exercise of those rights might cost your corporate betters a repair invoice.
You mistake Libertarian for "tax dodging Republican crybaby", but it's a common mistake.
I live in a bubble area. I hang out with civil servants. Low-paid civil servants. Teachers. Back in '04, '05, and even '05 I saw a number of them pay prices they could barely afford for the most remote or modest of homes so that they wouldn't be "priced out of the market forever." In their home county. Get it? Their home.
They thought this was their last chance to get some kind of stability, because rents were rising, too, and they might be squeezed out.
Now they're about to take it in the shorts -- not because they were greedy, but because they were desperate and everyone assured them that it was "now or never."
Some may want to reassure themselves that the fault lay in the individuals, not the system. But I see no fault in these people. In those who would judge, I see a lot of suppressed fear.
that said,
(I guess I shouldn't have said "lastly" before!!!!)
I have progressed beyond the overt BLAME that I used to have.
before, I'd see a proposed "victim" and my first subconscious reaction was to see how s/he was to blame.
(eg: last week when I asked "why doesn't she speak English")
this way I could reserve all sympathy.
now I am able to see the victim as simply a person. I can empathize without all the blame.
(eg: when I realized "hey, she would've made the same mistake with or without English, and I also signed documents at closing that I didn't fully understand")
this has freed my mind: now I don't bother trying to figure out whether or not the victim is a victim, because I'll never know anyway.
instead I can focus on my empathy for them and what should be done for them.
it's nice to get the hating out of my mind.
(I'm still upset with them all for doing this, but the hate is gone)
A national poll (by a well-respected polling firm) shows a majority of Americans believe that the Feds should let people who borrowed too much twist in the wind:
"Fifty-three percent (53%) of Americans say that the federal government should not help out homeowners who borrowed more than they could afford. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 29% disagreed and believed that federal action is appropriate. Seventeen percent (17%) are not sure."
"There is even stronger opposition to federal help for banks that made bad loans. By a 4-to-1 margin (61% to 15%) Americans reject that approach to resolving the current mortgage crisis."
Then again I am not a libertarian myself, at least not as the word is most typically used, so I'm probably capable of making the mistake of thinking y'all look alike. I mean, we're on the subject of making sweeping generalizations about people . . .
Ahh, the enduring good sense of the american electorate when asked if they should pay for someone else's mistakes. Just don't ask them if someone else should pay for theirs.
Well, there is no risk-free lunch, not even for lenders.Doesn't that violate your nutshell rule? Just kidding.
Yes to the rest, lenders are at risk. To compensate for that risk they charge interest. Lenders have no more right to risk protection than do the borrowers. If as a lender you feel you might be lending to someone who might pour cement into the toilets before defaulting then you charge more or you don't lend. There were no guns involved and the process worked pretty good for a very long time. Just because there is this new crop of streamlined lenders who ignored the rules about knowing your borrowers does not mean those rules went away.
Show your sympathy to a person who suffers but not when they spread their sufferings to others.
A person who destroys a mortgage property causes damage to the neighborhood through devaluation of other properties around. They should be socially damned.
I worked with people that bought cars on credit--knowing they couldn't afford it. Mitsubishi had no money down, no interest deals a couple of years ago. They worked the system, their cars were repossessed, they were happy to have a new car for a substantial time.
If you tempt them, they will come. Ask Mrs. Spitzer. (sorry, this is a humor diary)
I suspect for most, this wasn't their first trash experience. Many of these folks probably don't think twice about dropping garbage out the window either. Another sad theme in the overall sad plot.
It's been over a year for me watching the slow moving train wreck and while my portfolio is spared, the now daily bad news and jockeying by the greedy and/or incompetent is indeed depressing.
I don't care what motivated the buyers or the lenders - they made their decisions. They speculated and lost (on both sides). I don't laugh at them, but I don't feel sorry for them either. They need to suck up their losses and move on, without burdening those who acted more prudently.
I'm not looking to make their loss my gain. I'm advocating keeping their loss their loss - not mine.
With "Mark to Market" and "Jas Jain" coming in at less than 20 minutes on a post that tries to get the mean-spirited and the terminally humorless to stop for a minute and think about it, I believe we have just set some kind of internet record.
Here you go, making your Sunday complete.
Actually you are right this time. I don't care what happens to these leeches in principle, it's just the whining and begging that gets old. If they took the hits from their bad investments ans STFU there would be no issue. Heck, even if they walk away and take their hits there is no issue, but they should suffer the full consequences of their actions.
But it's the way it is, way too many people want to externalize liabilities and reap free rides, actually this is the #1 trait these days, they need a little 4byclue Singapore style justice.
Wiley Coyote was funny the first and second and third times, and then it wasn't anymore.
Altho the analogy to our economy is funny and scary.
I have never got the 3 Stooges tho I think the Whos on First think is probably not slapstick and funny if you like that kind of thing. (Apostrophe deliberately left out.)
I always thought the Stooges was a guy thing. I don't know anyone of the female persuasion who likes them.
The appellate court further noted that the court in Cornelison stated that the common law
action for waste was partially codified in Civil Code section 2929, which provides that
no person whose interest is subject to the lien of a mortgage may do any act which will
substantially impair the mortgagees security.12
Well, I had an assignment on a repo in a gated community last year. When I first drove up, I thought nice house. But it was completely gutted on the inside. I mean, everything was taken, carpet, doors, lights, cabinets, appliances, vanities, toilets; the sheetrock was ripped out and the plumbing and wiring stolen. It cost over $35,000 in repairs just to get this house into marketable condition.
But then I reasoned, what did anyone expect to happen in this environment? The lender says, no credit, no documentation, no down payment, hey, no problem! You can get a 100% LTV, roll over the closing costs, and move into this gorgeous house in a gated community for nothing. Then the appliance store says, no credit, no documentation, no down payment, hey, no problem! You don't even have to pay interest for the first year. You can have all the appliances for your new home for nothing. Then the furniture store says, no credit, no documentation, no down payment, hey, no problem. You don't even have to pay interest for the first year. You can have all this furniture for your new home for nothing.
All this for a house 10 miles from the Mexican border.
Now, is it a stretch of the imagination to see that this environment creates the perfect opportunity for someone to completely rennovate his house in Reynosa? I mean, take out the loan, buy and furnish the house, live in it for, what, a few weeks, then gut it, load up a truck, and head south.
Do I have any sympathy for these people? No, they're thieves. Do I have any sympathy for the lender, the appliance store or the furniture store? No, they're fools.
Now, that's a far cry from someone who was conned into taking out a loan he couldn't afford only to lose his house to foreclosure. Do I understand why he would trash the house before he was evicted? Yes. Do I condone it? No, not in the least. Do I have any sympathy for him? No, and the reason why is very simple. Because I've been conned more than once in my life, and no one ever had any sympathy for me.
I don't do politics, mainly because I got out of junior high in 1974. I believe in free people, free markets and free enterprise. But one cannot have free people without the rule of law. Nor can one have free markets without regulation or free enterprise without accountability.
What I have witnessed over the last decade or two is a complete disregard for the rule of law (illegal immigration, not to mention predatory lending), a total disintegration of regulation (shadow banking system) and an absolute dissolution of accountability (bailouts by the Fed). Some might refer to this as the Brave New World. I refer to it as Hell.
When asked what kind of government the Framers had given us, Ben Franklin famously said, "A republic, if you can keep it." Well, from what I've seen recently, we're doing a pretty damn good job of losing it.
Didn't White write the Once and Future King? And so was capable of style and verve.
Strunk and White doesn't even follow Strunk and White, as no competent writers would. Us professional linguists generally just ignore self-appointed language mavens, but the <a href=""http://www.languagelog.com">LanguageLog folks have tracked down a lot of S & W's inconsistencies.
I'll never get why people think that just because someone uses language, they're necessarily experts in how it works. We don't have people writing newspaper columns on biology just because they have lots of kids, or about the economy just because they're rich. Oh, wait...
One of these days I am going to figure out the psychology of people who insist on telling me that I used too many words to make a point that could have been made in two sentences/paragraphs. I haven't yet done so, but given that I seem doomed to endless exposure to this type, some day I will.
What is it with you philistines? I understand that you are philistines--you have no conception of reading and writing as anything other than strictly "efficient" information transfers, the linquistic equivalent of changing a twenty at the teller window--but I don't know why, as philistines, you keep exposing yourself to a writer whom you have to have learned by now doesn't play by your rules. Or why, having supposedly read all the way to the bottom, you keep trying to reform me. Have you never noticed that it doesn't work? Have you never run into that definition of repeating a failed strategy over and over again, the one with "insanity" in it?
I am not planning on reforming any time soon. I am here to amuse those in our readership who enjoy playing with words. Who rather like an oblique approach that opens up--rather than "foreclosing"--thought. Who do not want the executive summary, do not want the bullet points, do not want the cross-stitch sampler version.
The rest of you are free to be here--we don't card at the door--but you should have enough basic social skills to figure out that you aren't the one this piece was written for.
It's a big internet. Go read Instapundit if you want to be told what you think in as few words as possible. If you want to be adventurous and see what all the fuss is about on the other side, you do have to actually try the dishes on the buffet table. It does you no good to look 'em over once and then demand a bowl of tomato soup.
Now, is it a stretch of the imagination to see that this environment creates the perfect opportunity for someone to completely rennovate his house in Reynosa?
I would love to be alone in a room with the guy from Washington Mutual that dreamed up the scheme to keep billing my memory impaired mother for a flood insurance policy at 2x the cost of her policy already in force. This happened every year despite terse letters from me telling them to cut the crap. Bullshit like that is not accidental, and I would happily rip out all the wiring from his house right now.
Ok, I think I can be funny. People have laughed at my witticisms at parties. (You'll have to take my word for it.) Please explain to me the cheese joke.
Is it that one of them doesn't know the names of cheeses? As in Camenbert? Is that funny? Is there something else to it? I think this sailed 'way far UNDER me.
Really? Not even karmic prophylactic sympathy? Not even like, it's in my own self interest to cut a little slack to someone who misjudged his own margin of error in case I ever misjudge my own? Your reach never exceeded your grasp on anything? What a dour world you must inhabit.
Damn, I nearly missed that one. May I steal "karmic prophylactic sympathy" some day? It's wonderful.
I don't know if this is a profoundly new view, or not, but the question of a bailout (in any of its forms) misses the point that we are 7-8 years into a string of bailouts. I got to go out, but at least since the dot.com implosion, there has been successive bailouts: 9-11, airlines, auto, ailines, again, housing, autos, housing again etc...
Those that claim to have no sympathy for people being foreclosed on are, at best, pretending to sociopathy. A lot of them, I think, can't distinguish between having sympathy for someone and thinking that they need to be bailed out. For most of these people, I have a great deal of sympathy, but also think that the best way forward is to have the foreclosure proceed and for everyone to get on with their lives. However, I do think that it's a good idea for the rest of us to provide ways to help them move forward.
There are another set of people who claim to have no sympathy who seem to think that they will never make a catastrophic mistake. Therefore, they have nothing but ridicule for those who do make such errors. This is a set of people who I can't really fathom. I feel sorry for them, actually, and when some of them make catastrophic mistakes of their own, I will feel sympathy. I still reserve the right to tell them that the best way forward is for them to suck it up and move on. Maybe not, though.
There is a third set who not only can't see themselves making a catastrophic mistake, but don't really believe that anyone else will, either. Therefore, they ascribe all behavior that might be interpreted as a catastrophic mistake to malice. No one made an honest mistake in taking on a mortgage that they couldn't afford; they were just trying out a get rich quick scheme. My inclination is to think that these people are projecting, and that they would be more than happy to take advantage of a get rich scheme at someone else's expense if only they can convince themselves that it has no downside.
I just finished rereading the op, and there is one type of humor that isnt accounted for- the cop/emergency room/crisis response kind. There are times when you cant look away, you cant ignore whats in front of you, and you cant run from the room screaming. The only option is make jokes, usually at the expense of the parties to the incident.
The more I look at the fallout from subprime, the more I think the jokes are headed in this direction.
Is it fair? No, but hurt feelings are going to have to be put aside for now.
Curly goes crazy and can only be calmed by the smell and taste of cheese. Moe explains that Curly reacts to cheese this way because his mother was scared by a rat.
When Moe and/or Larry come to his aid and offer him cheese, Curly smells it and says, "No, Camembert!" (in different episodes, it's different kinds of cheese - Limburger, etc.)
Some Sunday reflection...Many of us here gathered calling BS to the nonsense around us and quietly cheering with every revelation.
Now that most see the bubble, we're looking to see how bad it will get. It seems many are in the disillusion stage and many want to avoid the panic stage which seems inevitable.
Perhaps a year from now, we'll see real pain all around as we debate whether we're in a depression. Our monitoring and positioning for the bubble burst will turn to looking for signs of anything positive.
We live in a selfish society, where everybody only cares about number one. The bankers have prayed on the more vulnerable and less intelligent classes to make large salaries and bonuses. (Still that does not excuse the wanton destruction of property, which in the end, is owned by somebody.) The whole system needs to be thoroughly cleaned up.
Perhaps a year from now, we'll see real pain all around as we debate whether we're in a depression. Our monitoring and positioning for the bubble burst will turn to looking for signs of anything positive.
I don't know why, as philistines, you keep exposing yourself to a writer whom you have to have learned by now doesn't play by your rules.
Oh, that's easy; some of us value not your words, but the ideas and expertise behind them. We would prefer to spend less time getting at those ideas and that expertise, but of course you are free to write however you please. (Just as we are free to complain about it.)
I am here to amuse those in our readership who enjoy playing with words. Who rather like an oblique approach that opens up--rather than "foreclosing"--thought.
Very well. But could you do a small favor for a poor philistine? Try to be careful that your wordiness does not merely become an excuse for responding to any criticism with, "Shorter [xxx]: You need to take out all of the parts of the post that aren't validating my point of view. It would make more sense to me that way." Such dodging of criticism makes your "baroque" style look less like art and more like an attempt to disguise fuzzy thinking.
Really? Not even karmic prophylactic sympathy?
Yawn. I made it perfectly clear, repeatedly, what I meant by having no sympathy: No bail-out, thanks.
Of course my own reach has exceeded my grasp, and it will again, but I will never ask (much less demand) that somebody else bear the cost. I pay for my mistakes; I do not even argue over speeding tickets. In my world, we all take full responsibility for our own choices. And it is not a dour place at all; quite the opposite, in fact.
Some truths really are simple, and sometimes brevity really is the soul of wit.
I have sympathy for bad journalists. Heck, I even have sympathy for whiny bloggers who love to complain about bad journalists. Do you think they ever considered doing something about it, like, I dunno, maybe becoming a journalist for a mainstream publication? But that would be too hard, it is much more fun to whine about it.
For the record my frequent and public pronouncements of having no sympathy whatsoever are nothing but a dumbed down oversimplification because explaining the complexities of why actions need consequences for the ultimate good of those in trouble merely confuses and stirs up the rabble.
some of us value not your words, but the ideas and expertise behind them. We would prefer to spend less time getting at those ideas and that expertise
But there's no free lunch, Nemo. There's no get-expertise-quick scheme around here. You gotta work for it, you gotta earn it, and you don't get bailed out if you blow it.
Besides, I am not an "expertise mine" that you can decide to exploit more efficiently. I've never even had someone who was paying my salary say such a thing to me. Seriously.
You all took a wonderful country and royally screwed it up. You are all full of doo-doo and willingly gave up the rights of future generations so you could live in your happy utopia of blue ED pills, boats, SUVs, and second and third homes. But now that all of your boats, SUVs, second and third homes are starting to look like poor investments, you will pawn off the tab to your sons, daughters, and grandchildren. A true testament to those who saw the BS upclose... after all I suppose you are the people who ushered in the era of a "no fault divorce". Even in this time, I'm sure you'll end up electing another boomer to run the country, in-spite of the failures of the last two boomer presidents. You are truly a generation of people who have "manned up" and taken responsibility for your government and their actions.
I'm sorry, but I just can't take this anymore, because whenever I look at "who" is leading "everything" in our "country" it's always some darn awful boomer. I'm sorry but most of you are stuck in a Cold War mind-set... I'd really like someone to show me otherwise... but your policies are killing the younger generations. From health care costs, to college costs, to energy costs, to housing costs.
Tanta sounds like my dear dparted granny if she, my granny, had had a PHD in Finance. No BS, call'm as you see them, if you don't like it take a hike. Great fun!
You are winning no hearts and minds to your cause. You just aren't. I take seriously your right to your cause. I am giving you some advice.
Repeating yourself with the volume turned up to 11 is not a species of using persuasive language or engaging in honest debate with someone else. It is, well, having a tantrum.
Since it's literary Sunday, I will also point out that using caps or boldface or exclamation points or all of the above does not increase the truth-value or utility of a statement. These things merely call attention to a statement. Rather desperately, in many cases.
Foreclosed tenent simply refers to a person who is foreclosed upon and is living in the house. If you don't "get it", then do some research - if would have taken you less time than writing a rambling entry that added nothing to the blogsphere.
Anthony, I reserve my right to assume that your reasons for your belief are as childish as your delivery.
There is waaay too much emotion invested by the anti-bailout crowd. They can no longer read any post, on any subject, without launching into it. You can even write a post begging people to stop being so self-involved, and they just fire back with IT DOES TOO MATTER HOW I FEEL ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE!
I therefore suggest not having a tantrum, even if you're tempted.
California's Treasurer Bill Lockyer sees it differently. He sees decades of history in which almost no muni bonds have fallen victim to a default. (MBIA and Ambac got in trouble not because they guaranteed munis, but because they branched into riskier areas, backing bundles of other loans, including those notorious sub-primes.)
Lockyer argues that the main reason muni bond buyers think insurance is needed at all in most cases is because the big credit ratings agencies don't evaluate state and local government debt the same way as corporate debt, artificially lowering credit ratings for those governments.
again,
I'll echo that others seem to feel as I do, although they word it differently.
to be concise (since above I rambled over several posts)
-many of us have empathy but not necessarily sympathy
-the goal IMO is to separate having empathy with that of fiduciary responsibility to the involved parties
-and too many people confuse the above two very separate ideas.
you can:
-have empathy and want a bailout
-have empathy but oppose a bailout
-have no empathy and want a bailout
-have no empathy and oppose a bailout.
but it gets lost, especially when people simply scream "NO BAIL OUT"
and it is also lost as those like me (with empathy but opposed to a bailout) get angry when we see the bailout comin'
reminds me of my crystal meth brother. I have empathy and sympathy for him. Am I going to bail him out of jail again, or give him money? hell no. been there, done that. Doesn't mean I hate him, but I sure hate what he's done to our family. and sometimes it's hard to separate out that hurt.
and I'm not sure I want to give any more of my money to the finance/homeowner addicts either.
Besides, I am not an "expertise mine" that you can decide to exploit more efficiently. I've never even had someone who was paying my salary say such a thing to me. Seriously.
Point taken. I apologize, and today is the last day you will find me complaining about your writing style.
That said, in my experience, "oblique" writing is often precisely an attempt to "foreclose" -- rather than open up -- thought and debate. Just something to consider.
"When you fight with monsters, take care lest you become a monster; and when you stare into an abysss, the abyss also stares into you."
Have a great day, all. I am off to enjoy the sunshine.
Given that we're already bailing out Wall Street, specifically including Bear shareholders, through the Fed with the public blessing of the Ownership Society Administration, shouldn't the tantrums read NO MORE BAILOUTS rather than NO BAILOUTS?
Excellent and enjoyable post Tanta. Your comments were also good - I particularly liked you have no conception of reading and writing as anything other than strictly "efficient" information transfers, the linquistic equivalent of changing a twenty at the teller window - I plead guilty to that of course but I claim my saving grace has always been the ability to laugh at myself.
There were many gems in your post. Wonderful.
Regarding the subject at hand - sympathy and empathy I have aplenty - for all parties, lenders too at that - you can't have spent 50 years on this planet and not become aware of the insanities and absurdities that abound - but, OT ( since the main post was not about this aspect and I explicitly acknowledge that but its an aspect I focus on( yeah I know what that makes me )), when it comes to money there is zero chance that I'll dip into my pocket voluntarily, at this stage of the game, and will work hard to escape the clutches of silent pickpockets (i.e. the Fed and their trashing of the US$) and other assorted thieves who want to dip and ARE DIPPING into my pocket.
They can call on me when we get to the havela, shanty town or Mumbai slum, (Hooverville 2010 style?) level but not till then.
OT: Misrepresentation. A representation (other than a representation under Section 3(e) or (f)) made or repeated or deemed to have been made or repeated by the party or any Credit Support Provider of such party in this Agreement or any Credit Support Document proves to have been incorrect or misleading in any material respect when made or repeated or deemed to have been made or repeated;
Tanta, No more bailouts, true. I get your point there. I don't think the general population yet understands what is happening, or indeed the implications of bailouts. The MSM in general lets people believe bailouts are the saviors of the economy, when in fact they are aimed at saving the bankers and their jobs. Will there come a time when people realize this?
"Perhaps it would help to get all legalistic and persnicketty and point out that loans are foreclosed."
Listen here, I'm a piece of paper with a punch of ink all over me. However, I find myself important. When others say they are ruptured by the inability of parties to live up to the meaning of the ink all over me, I take offence. My understanding is that when you monkeys splashed all that ink on me, and scribbled your name on the bottom, my understanding was that I (since I is already capitalized, I cannot use caps to emphasize I) was the ruptured party. With all these rupturings going 'round now, I feel quite slighted, as well as having a severe headache. All you scribbling monkeys can go stuff yourselves. I'm outa here.
Since it's such a rambling blog with many subtleties, I'll respond in kind.
Tanta said: "...It has, actually, been hard for me to "get" why some people think that the first question to be established in any discussion of the real world is whether their own personal sympathies are engaged or not..."
That's a completely normal place to start, as long as it doesn't end there. I just take issue with people who don't get past that point and extrapolate out the misery of a few as the misery of the many.
The same "corrupt" system that is "screwing" other of my fellow citizens is profiting me, and not at their expense. Also, in many ways the homeowners being "bailed-out" will ultimately be worse-off than me, who needs no bailout even though I took the same risk as they did, taking out a mortgage and buying a house.
Tanta also made the comment that (paraphrased) "we are interpreting reality instead of recording it like a good camera."
I like that phrase a lot, and "recording it like a good camera" is what I try to do when I look at housing, the economy or the stock market. While I may personally sympathize (or not) with homeowners running into trouble, that's not a factor when I'm trying to figure out what I should be doing about it (selling my house and renting, shorting homebuilder stocks, whatever).
Finally, as to what constitutes humor,
on the right-hand side of the CR site, I'm looking at these ads:
"Virgin Money Loans
Protect your relationships and money when using private loans."
"We Do The Impossible
Commercial Mortgage Lender Funding Loans Since 1990"
"Church Loans & Investment
Traditional Lending to Churches Since 1959 for Building & Refinance"
"Fed Cuts Rates 1/2 Point
Free & Easy Mortgage Calculator. Check Payments & Rates at Move.com"
"JLS Loans and Realty
Helping your dreamd come true Residential-Investment-Commercial"
...on a bearish housing blog that regularly bemoans the real-estate bubble and over-indebtedness of the American people.
Not sure if this is funny or as criminal as the very contradictions of the High, the Mighty and the New York Times that Tanta so much loves to tee-off on.
I just finished rereading the op, and there is one type of humor that isnt accounted for- the cop/emergency room/crisis response kind.
I think a humor theorist--there are them--would say that this kind of humor is actually the opposite of the kind I identify in the post. It isn't "subversive," it's "repressive." It attempts to make certain facts easier to "deal with," rather than making certain kinds of sanctimony harder to maintain. On the one hand it's kind of a natural human reaction to horror: deflect, deflect, deflect. On the other hand, it's the same impulse that makes the bully operate: ridicule a person in public, and the person therefore loses his essential humanity and becomes a "butt" we can all proceed to have no sympathy for without feeling uncomfortable about it.
I surely agree that it will get harder and harder to tell the difference as this thing unwinds.
120 people in their preferred place of worship here this am.
Couple of items --
T.H. White not William White wrote
Once and Future King if memory serves
Elements of Style was primarily for
mass media, advertising, public relations practioners to communicate to the broadest range of literate readers more effectively and is still useful to bloggers even if more widely ignored than ever.
S N posted a couple of times about damage to properties by "foreclosed tenants" -- perhaps examine the psychology more closely S N, not just the legality.
At the time the foreclosure has actually happened, say Day 1, which terminates the mortgage and the note obligations for BOTH parties, on Day Two the former borrowers if still in possession of the premises are no longer legally bound to such promised good behavior. Judicial opinions may differ but that is way after the fact.
If the new foreclosed tenants are pissed, they might act it out.
Legal consequences will be last thing on their minds "getting even" is first. Childish, I know, and of no long term benefit to them just some short term knowing they didn't take dispossession entirely bending over.
Even if it was all their fault to start with.
BTW, there are hard ass lender's representatives, aka repo specialists, say, who do their damndest to be turned in "victims" of such short fuse people.
Gawain's Ghost is obviously an appraiser, as am I; be one in any US metro area through up and down markets for 20+ years and you will have "seen most of it, but not all".
The scenario of buying a house in way south CA just to strip it out to furnish a house in Mexico is not implausable and is not racist either.
This would be a crime of opportunity with the opportunists taking full advantage of those lenders and merchants who literally begged for it in broadcast advertising.
now back to my regularly scheduled Roadrunner and Opus cartoons
"today is the last day you will find me complaining about your writing style."
Perhaps now you can clue the others in as well? Simply because we can't see you or it's more difficult to throw you out doesn't impart any justification for your disrespect.
Re: Actually I have this terrible habit of curling my right hand into a fist and literally banging on the "enter" key (the one on the far right, on the number pad).
Sebastian, I do not believe that anyone is a "good camera." Not you. Not me. Not Jas.
We are all interpreting. Our only hope is to make clear the assumptions we bring to that activity and to take into account the fact that we choose what to look at--and others might choose differently and get different results.
This is an issue that philosophers of the west and the east and the south and the north have been kicking around since, oh, antiquity. I am never going to claim I've solved the problem--that would be fearful hubris--but I am going to claim that the term "sophomoric" is something you don't want to earn. A lot of the reason you get beaten up pretty severely by other commenters here is that you do have a tendency to suggest that you're the only one who can "see things as they are."
Re: legislative declarations of emergency are "conclusive" unless "obviously false and a palpable attempt at dissimulation."[24] There have been some vigorous judicial dissents to such deference, the most notable in an amusing case in which a city declared an emergency need for a new sports stadium...
Anonymous writes:
no, the joke's on me, who tried to buy a house in 05 and thought the things were just cwazee and decided to wait it out... looks like the bailout's not for me.
Anonymous | 03.30.08 - 11:16 am
No, joke is on me. I succeeded in buying in 2005, using fixed rate financing that I can afford, but totally oblivious to how far out of reality RE prices were. Now similar houses down the street list for 12% less and nobody even comes to look. Since I can actually make my payments, no bailout for me.
Lucky for me, I have a sense of humor. And a steady job .
(In retrospect, I'd have been pretty far ahead had I not succeeded and kept renting.)
I'm sorry, but I just can't take this anymore, because whenever I look at "who" is leading "everything" in our "country" it's always some darn awful boomer. .... your policies are killing the younger generations. From health care costs, to college costs, to energy costs, to housing costs.
YLSP | 03.30.08 - 12:52 pm | #
Word.
Chris Bowers has referred to it as a "generational failure."
The boomer generation's version of the Apollo project is....the Iraq war.
I have never felt bound by dead 19th century grammarians, codified by dead 20th century fascist engrish teachers.
If Shake speare could modify 'cording to his wonts, why can't I?
As for the topic of M.McA. She is a definite glibertarian, who benefited from a stretch at the Economist, but didn't quite take it all to heart.
Well, as for the tear out therapy, folks can't afford those high priced psychofolks who justify all their failures. Instead, they rip out the plumbing and wiring and use the proceeds to pay for the beer to keep the party going.
As for the property right respecting upright folks here- whats in your family tree? Got any cousins in the crow bar motel? If not, then did you just liquidate them, or just disown them?
Geez, my b-i-l needs some of that sympathy along with a check as his business turtles, told him that it was coming, but did he listen?
Heck no. So now you can either help or let him sink faster, or slow enough to maybe salvage his primary house.
Bah. Easy enough to tell folks what to do, hard enough to get them to do even half of your prescription.
Life in a community requires sacrifice by all the community members, otherwise we could all just go back to the cavemen days. GO TANTA GO!!!
I get the trash out as a means to get some back. It falls into the category of keying a car in retaliation. But is anyone else worried about how far the undercurrent of anger might grow? The rioting that followed the Rodney King trial didn't rise out of a social vacuum. Real anger was involved. Just seems like a huge mistake to ignore the new anger.
Trash outs feel a little like the tip of an iceberg.
Everyone (is supposed to) leave it behind in college. Sebastian's posts tend to imply that he's older than I am.
The classic "sophomoric" essay (not to be confused with a plain old sophomore essay) begins: "Since the dawn of time, human beings have ______."
They're most amusing when the blank is filled in with something of obvious recent historical vintage, like "relied on financial advisors" or what have you. But the real failing--aside from just using a cliche--is that only the sophomoric begin an argument by declaring that whatever it's going to be about is an unarguable fact of an immutable human nature that has never changed and never will.
Tanta said: "A lot of the reason you get beaten up pretty severely by other commenters here is that you do have a tendency to suggest that you're the only one who can "see things as they are."..."
Granted, and I should correct that.
It's not that I'm the only one who can see things as they are, because many can.
If there's anything positive I bring to this party, it's that I have the capability of comparing current conditions with previous times when conditions were similar, from which I can draw reasonable conclusions as to what's likely to happen next.
And perhaps I should be more circumspect on other issues outside of that specialty.
mcmegan one of the most intentionally stupid glibertarians writing today. To add to that sadness, she's young enough to pollute future generations with her offal rather than, if she were older, being able to look forward to her retirement.
Maybe the whole boom was fueled by a kind of tantrum about getting one before they're out of reach. Getting one NOW, not later.
No, the boom in house prices was likely due more to the -
Dot com bust, resulting in a desire for a more stable investment
Falling interest rates, resulting in rising prices for existing homes
Changes in the mortgage industry, originating mortgages for sale
Maybe baby boomer demographics, able to afford to spend more
I'm no big fan of a(nother) bailout
myself. However, I'd love nothing more than to see a little across-the-board enforcement of the game rules already on the books.
How's ACME's stock been doing since Wile E. has been retired?
Except FDIC insurance. Don't want to return that excess savings. (Waving the flag)
And, and...
Social Security! Don't want to be forced to support my in-laws who didn't save anything. (Waving flag more vigourously)
And, Medicare! I don't want my parents (who ate trans-fats) to die an ugly, pointless death. (Waving two flags)
And....
The Federal Reserve! Keep subsidizing banks so there is somebody crazy enough to keep loaning money in case I need to sell my house, or write a check, or get paid. (cue patriotic music)
If we are going to screw somebody, it better darn well be the gold bugs and the gun nuts. Because, darn'it, they just shouldn't be right.
The difference may be whether you are an outsider looking in, or an insider looking for a way out.
I am always inclined to think that reserving your right to re-think something is a wise approach.
I once responded to a suggestion from the surgical oncologist who had only recently removed 48 centimeters of my intestinal tract that "you've got more guts than I do." That might have elicited a grin, but it also wiped one off some's face, as it were.
Hostility or good humor? Who knows? The fact that I was still attached to a morphine pump might have had something to do with it, but I suspect I'd have said it drug-free if it had occurred to me quickly enough.
Some things are just so ambiguous that you can't ever "decide" them.
DEFLATION---HOWSWEETITIS said (of Tanta): "Sometimes your posts rub me the wrong way, like a snob that loves to boast of his/her intellectual superiority."
Don't confuse Tanta with me or Jas Jain. She's not just boasting.
Tanta wrote, "Sometimes the joke actually arises when we find the naive or uninformed or logic-impaired coming up with an inspired phrase like "foreclosed tenants.".
I'm sure blog writers love to be called "logic-impaired".
I see no reason to use these choice words.
Why not say you choose to disagree and give the reasons why? Not sure why there is a need to use the words naive,uninformed or logic-impaired, even if that may be true.
Although most of the regular readers of this blog are probably like me people who long believed that the upward trend of home prices was unsustainable and would end, and we have been proven right, we must never forget that even at the peak of the boom some of the most famous economists in the world -- including Ben Bernanke -- were opining that the worst that could happen would be that prices would plateau for a while.
Five years ago my daughter and her husband, viewing the relentless rise in prices and wanting a home they could modify to their tastes, started shopping for a house. I strongly advised them to wait, because prices would fall. Other factors came into play to cause them to wait two years, during which prices continued to soar and the buying power of of their substantial down-payment savings suffered relentless erosion -- and the economist comments and "expert" quotes continued the drumbeat of "prices will never fall".
So three years ago they bought -- shopping carefully, with a big down payment, and not completely rejecting my arguments and so at a price they could well afford.
One factor in their decision was a belief that if housing prices started to fall very much, the Fed and Congress would organize a bailout -- and gee, it looks like that just might happen.
Personally, I continue to think that we are entering into a period like Japan's slump so well described by Richard Koo in "Balance Sheet Recession" -- a period in which everyone is concentrating on balance sheet repair, paying down debt and rebuilding savings -- such that any attempt to blow a new bubble will be futile.
But I could be wrong. It may be that for most of the people who bought in the bubble years, that was the right decision -- that most of them will be bailed out, home prices will resume their relentless rise, and people like me who sold with the intent to buy again when prices fall are just suckers.
If so, then the people who are getting foreclosed upon during this transient period before the bailout kicks in are quite justified in feeling they've been had. Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and all the other experts assured them that buying was the right decision, that prices would never fall. And they are just in the unlucky minority that's not going to get bailed out.
"If there's anything positive I bring to this party, it's that I have the capability of comparing current conditions with previous times when conditions were similar, from which I can draw reasonable conclusions as to what's likely to happen next."
You use the Wright Model BS Flying Pig, which is a yield curve model that does not even consider 3 Sigma events, let alone 6 Sigma events.
If we were all pragmatists we could agree that (a) foreclosed borrowers would feel the desire to trash said property (b) those who refused to participate in the buying binge would resent those who did and thereby aided in the bubble (c) that politicians would feel the need to provide a bailout, which I think is a certainty in a more expanded form next year and (d) that financial participants had sufficient incentives to create the bad loans that led to this crisis.
Personally, I've never understood the line of "two million homeowners that are at risk of losing their home." They will just go back to renting, which is what they should have been doing in the first place. Some of them are likely to be genuine victims of fraud, while some of them would have been gloating at those on the sidelines if their bet had turned out well.
I have yet to see any substantial comment on the dynamics of pricing of new housing developments. I'll wager that the builders offered lower prices to those buying first (in "Phase 1") for a variety of reasons. As the development proceeds, "Phase 2" prices are set higher, for basically identical properties/houses. "Phase 3" are higher still. Now it doesn't take a genius to realize that if they buy at "full market value" in Phase 1, by the time Phase 2 is selling at higher prices, they buyers of Phase 1 have already made a profit (or built equity), since a completely comparable home has just sold at a higher price.
So, seeing how this happens, it would be perfectly rational to buy a house with no money down, knowing that equity would be built as soon as enough properties had sold. Heck, even buy another one on spec. I'm sure builder financing made it even easier than buy a house in the secondary market.
And, once this instant equity was acheived, refinancing out of short-term floating mortgages would be easy since the homeowner wouldn't be doing 100% financing.
The point it that there were a lot of reasons to buy homes with no money down. It does sound like a Ponzi scheme, since it is all predicated on having someone come around to take you out at a higher price. But that sounds like investing, in a way. There are numerous examples of hedge funds which put on trades and became "the market" for their positions. They failed spectacularly because they forgot, or misestimated, who was going to take them out of their positions at a higher price. Sometimes higher prices bring in more buyers, and sometimes they bring in more sellers.
In the housing market, clearly the rise in prices brought in more sellers (builders) and more buyers. The buyers were overwhelming the sellers. After a while, there was no one left to buy. And when that happens, there are only sellers left. And that's where we are today.
Misean said: "You use the Wright Model *************, which is a yield curve model that does not even consider 3 Sigma events, let alone 6 Sigma events...."
The yield-curve is one of the models that anticipates the conditions under which such events can or are likely to occur.
A model which uses high stock-market valuations and low earnings growth as inputs is another.
Do you honestly believe that recessions and stock market crashes are like a strike from a planet-killer asteroid, an event of total randomness over which there is no human control?
Doesn't CR's forecast of a housing "bubble" and "credit crunch" totally discredit your point of view, that such extreme events can't be foreseen?
Head of HUD Alphonse Jackson is on C-Span before the Hispanic realtors. Never seen him speak before, but anyone that can recognize a confidence man would have nothing to do with this fellow. "We saw this coming in 2005", ha-ha-ha. "$17b in FHASecure", a blatant falsehood. Wow. Sorry, don't believe anything said by a confidence man from Texas.
Yes, TH White wrote "The Once and Future King" but EB White wrote "Charlotte's Web" and re-edited "The Elements of Style"
Of them, Charlotte's Web is obviously the best.
I enjoyed JF Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales" when I was a pre-teen, which made all the more delicious when I read Mark Twain's devastating critique. Oddly enough, after I read the post and the comments, I perceived an inverse relationship, that is, those who are critiquing Tanta "style" are unintentionally humorous.
The main relationship I see in the length of this post is Tanta's need to vent her spleen, which the surgeon could have rectified by installing a spleen bypass valve while he was mucking about in there.
Do you honestly believe that recessions and stock market crashes are like a strike from a planet-killer asteroid, an event of total randomness over which there is no human control?
Human emotions are the causes, and no they didn't control any of it if they did they would never hapen right. One didn't need a model to see this train wreck coming back in 05 just good common sense was enough unless you were drinking the kool-aid.
If Tanta's posts are really "too long," how come so many of us read them to the end, feel sad when they are over, and then cut to the comments in hopes she'll elaborate a little more and/or get off some nice little shots at her critics?
"Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in "Deerslayer," and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record."
I apologise for straying off topic and probably feeding trolls, but the anti baby-boomer comments on this and other blogs are (I hope) worthy of comment. They sometimes seem to have the flavor of a more or less organized political move to decrease support for programs such as medicare and social security. Blaming boomers rather than republicans for Iraq is an interesting twist.
This may be too paranoid. It could just be the need to blame some group for what we fear is the destruction of our futures.
Tanta: on Trash-out deals - karma works in mysterious ways. One of the common ways that the banksterfraudsters would sell the "american dream of homeownership " to first time buyers was to portray the landlord as some absentee, pot-bellied, cigar-chomping evil-doer.
wow. Well Tanta, that was absolutely a great post. Incredibly great. hugely great. amazingly amazing (ly) great. So great in fact, that I read all the comments, something, I rarely do for any blogger even my favorites which, by the way, you are.
Okay, now, as someone who has no sense of humor (ask anyone) and is way too Sunday-school sympathetic to everyone, I have to say: the amount of serious, not quite with it, response to your post is absolutely amazing. In my learning about humor I come to understand that this is par for the course, which is funny, but really painful. Doh! Maybe that's why pain is funny -- all the humorless people who keep hurting themselves instead of getting the joke.
In more serious news: if you are going to be all straight and self righteous (ye commentersers ye) then the least you could do, it seems to this excessively serious person, is focus on the present and the future, not the past. I have bad news for you: the bailout? like um, she's already left port. Yup and took your taxes/bride with her.
So Tanta, I really do appreciate that your blog is non-political, even though, I myself, am extravagantly political. But I have to admit that I'm surprised that you chose to get political on some dumb writers essay, as opposed to the incredible, and (it's true) incredibly funny political machinations of our owners.
You see, all you serious ones, there is nothing quite as funny as a Republican president of the united states (who one assumes stands naked, though one shouldn't really assume much with this one) coming out and telling us that since we have a fiscal crisis it must be the institutions implemented in the New Deal that are to blame, and the obvious right thing to do is to 1) create a brand new federal system of regulation (golly I thought republicans wanted less new bureacracies not more, and gee, haven't we heard this song and dance before, but wait there's more), one in which 'all power will be centralized' (yeah baby centralize that evil gubmint), and in fact, now that you sort of well force us to think about these (ugh!) regulatory (holding nose) issues it seems pretty obvious that what we really ought to do (here it comes, bring it on home baby) is institutionalize (that is to say, formally, and legally make it the job of) the fed being in the business of (home run time) PROPPING UP MARKETS. Why, yes Batman, I do think, that is the proper role of goverment, and how very insightful, and generally leaderly of you, beloved hero to us all, to figure it out first.
The thing I don't 'get' about the 'sense of humor' crowd, is how come, they don't really notice when a 'sense of humor' is being used to, as we in the 'serious business' crowd all to often say, fuck you right straight up the asshole. but methinks it has something to do with what that avowed genius of our times called 'redefining reality while you in the reality community take note'. er something like that.
Take that Strunk and White.
The fact that my writing is most closely analogous to William F. Buckley's is a fact which has begun to, slowly, but with real punch, seep, into my humorless, but still functioning despite it's 1) alcohol soaked floppiness, and 2) much noted, all the more ironically so given what follows, pea-brain, and which, while it gives me pause, in some sense, tells me there is something fundamentally okay about the world.
"Doesn't CR's forecast of a housing "bubble" and "credit crunch" totally discredit your point of view, that such extreme events can't be foreseen?"
Well, I don't think you can consider this an "extreme" event, given that it was forseable, forseen, and inevitable.
Unless by "extreme" you mean, extreme in its damage.
I've seen a few "extreme" car wrecks. When you fall asleep behind the wheel after a fifth of scotch, you tend to make something that is relatively rare and extreme, (like an ugly fatal car crash), pretty predictable and inevitable.
This "housing bubble" and "credit crunch" may be rare, but certainly can't be considered an "extreme" in the the hoocudanode sense.
"Normally it falls to conservatives to cry "moral hazard" when policies such as this, expressly designed to reward imprudent behaviour, are announced. "
"This" being gov't programs that rescue people who are underwater on their mortgages.
When the programs are the repeal of gov't regulations and oversight, there's not a whisper out of these cowards.
It beggars the imagination that sometime and drive-by commenters could castigate the blogmother, who took time out from her Sunday to jot a tasty, funny post for our entertainment, accusing her of verbosity, (which is her style,) because they have ADD.
I am still cheesing (that's for you lawyerliz!) over the statistical wizardry of last August, when market participants declared both a "26 sigma event" and "a one in 10,000 year event that happened three days in a row" (1 x 10^12 or thereabouts)...
Vizzini: Inconceivable.
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.
It's divide and conquer. If consumer/workers cannabalize each other and blame each other, there will be no social/political movement for change. The corrupt in power win and the power corrupts absolutely. Blame should start at the top. But we are a nation divided and it will be match, game, and set for the Powers That Be(Fed, executive branch, congress, big money, etc.)
All you blaming the victims of ponzi scheme bubble scams bust cycles/fire sales are working for the Man.
I had wanted to point out how funny it is that, every once in while, the administration actually admits that what its' just done was in fact...
UTTERLY and COMPLETELY ILLEGAL
The only thing funnier is that somehow, and I have to admit, I have absolutely no idea of how...
NO ONE NOTICES.
Did you notice that in their own announcement the bright guys who own your sorry little asses, just told you, that the bailout of Bear Stearns was illegal, that they had in fact exceeded their legal mandate? hmmmm....
Don't worry, will fix that, says the man behind the curtain... We'll make it legal! Ta Da!
Am I the only person on the planet who is starting to think that maybe the 'bailout of Bear Stearns' wasn't a 'bailout' at all, but rather the first example of a wall street brokerage having sufficient political muscle that it was able to use the federal government's powers to assist in it's take over of a competitor?
And like, if that is is going on then maybe there like isn't really a federal government at all anymore?
Gee, and you thought I called myself VoiceFromTheWilderness for nothing.
I am still cheesing (that's for you lawyerliz!) over the statistical wizardry of last August, when market participants declared both a "26 sigma event" and "a one in 10,000 year event that happened three days in a row" (1 x 10^12 or thereabouts)...
Yep.
It couldn't be that, oh say, the model they're using to make these calculations doesn't quite conform to reality.
The idea that these finanial wizards don't have the entire world as we know it wrapped up into a few neat equations just isn't plausible.
I for one am looking forward to our daily 10,000 year flood when the markets open tomorrow.
But you could also shorten the Bible to say: "Love God and obey the golden rule.",
or, instead of telling your child the story of the boy who cried wolf, well you could just say "don't lie" and save yourself some time.
You could also shorten Moby Dick to "some dude goes after a white whale and dies."
Heck, just the phrase "Boy meets girl and all hell breaks loose!" could literally free up miles of bookshelve space in your local library, making more room for computers for even the financially impaired bloggers who want it all and want it now.
I know this blog is highly respected, but reading a few of Tanta's posts, which sound mostly like just rants, makes me wonder where all the hypes come from.
They're counting on people not knowing they've been hoodwinked. With so many apparent imbeciles running amok in our culture, I think they'll probably pull it off.
Nemo writes:
They begin to grasp that they had only ever been given a short-term lease on the "American Dream," not a piece of the "ownership society" pie.
Um, no. What they were given was an opportunity that they abused by buying something they could not afford, because they hoped it would make them wealthy.
I have no sympathy for these people, and neither should anybody else. This is not about making jokes or making fun of anybody.
It might be a crime (although damaging property that legally belongs to you doesn't sound like a black and white crime to me). It is at minimum a violation of your mortgage contract (I remember seeing language about insuring, maintaining and not damaging the property). But banks are businessmen who are familiar with risks. They knew or should have known the likelihood of this "mess" as well as the likelihood of the vandalism that would ensue. But all they were interested in was a paper profit to get there next annual bonuses. And they knew how many people were being pushed into homelessness because rents in the bubble areas were so unaffordable due to their artificially inflated values. And they knew how many people were buying into the bubble out of the perceived necessity to have a stable housing payment that wasn't prone to 20% rent increases every year (I have lived in cities like that, and after 5 or 6 years a very cheap market becomes almost unaffordable - then what do you do? quit your job and move somewhere cheap without a job? Yes, the freemarket will always take care of us, or anihilate us for the greater good)
I don't know what's more offensiveness about people like you. Your smug simplemindedness, or your soulessness. But today I'll go for the smug simplemindedness.
Disenfranchised powerless paupers with no hope for the future lose morale and faith in the system. The masses will begin to operate in the manner of those above them. Without conscience and in a narcissistic pattern. What you see is what you get. There's no incentive to be honest in a corrupt, avaricious system. The looting of worker/consumers' lifetime savings and nest eggs can't end well. There will be resentment but as long as it doesn't jell into a movement for change, the growing legal/'justice'/prison system will deal with discontent as corruption at the top remain intact. Yahoo. Deal or no deal people. Let's say no deal to the takeover of the system by the elite pension, retirement, and savings raiders.
I once responded to a suggestion from the surgical oncologist who had only recently removed 48 centimeters of my intestinal tract that "you've got more guts than I do." That might have elicited a grin, but it also wiped one off some's face, as it were./i>
I had the same operation. I said "You've turned my colon into a semicolon!"
Yes Tanta you understand all this better than almost anyone. What you might not understand completely, is how lacking in understanding most of them are, and now irrational they get when angry, frustrated and cornered. People that angry don't worry about being sensible and rational. To ask or expect them to be so is a bit irrational itself.
People that angry don't worry about being sensible and rational. To ask or expect them to be so is a bit irrational itself.
Well, of course.
But people who are angry about other people who are so angry they aren't rational, are another story.
I see no reason why I can't get angry about those who are angry about the angry. Especially when it produces people who are angry because I'm angry at the anger over the angered.
It did all start because McArdle claimed she didn't "get" this anger. I never actually said I approved of it; in one part of the post I did even slip in the claim that I don't. But I do understand it.
Apparently, to some people, even to understand these ex-homeowners' emotional state is to have gone beyond the pale.
It reminds me of the old stale pogroms that used to go on in the name of "moral clarity," which always seemed to end up meaning "moral ignorance."
Misean said: "No actually it doesn't. Throw me a 4 Sigma event. Oh wait we've got BSC, a 5 Sigma event. Never mind."
Well, in returning to the introspective tone of Tanta's original blog, I would pose this question to you: If you know this to be a bogus indicator (my yield-curve model), why so threatened by it that you feel the need to go out of your way to denigrate it, and me, when it's not even the topic of discussion? (Even a serial thread-hijacker like me didn't bring it up this time, you did.)
Just something to ponder. When I critique CR's charts and data I try to use specific examples of how his indicators can generate false signals, so that everyone can follow along and see what I'm looking at.
From a purely selfish point of view:
It is OK for people who are losing their home to trash it.
Doing that will lower real estate prices more and that will be good for renters (which is what these homeowners will now be).
Remember, from a renter's point of view: the more that real estate crashes, the better.
Not nice to say, but hey, let real estate come down MUCH more. Better opportunities for the ones who didn't buy into the frenzy.
Anonymous said: "It is OK for people who are losing their home to trash it.
Doing that will lower real estate prices more and that will be good for renters (which is what these homeowners will now be)."
This gives me an idea of what the next big "thing" will be in the media coverage of the housing "bust": Evicted homeowners who are in cahoots with renters (or other home-buyers, legitimate or not) that deliberately trash their home for the express purpose of reducing the rent/asking price.
Ought to be at least once or twice that it could happen, which would be good enough to indicate a national "trend", by media standards.))
I must admit I find it astonishing that a piece basically saying 'people shouldn't be surprised when other people do dumb things when they are angry & foreclosure makes a lot of people angry' gets 200 plus angry comments.
Makes me wonder how many folks live & work around 'real people' - you know the kind of people who sometimes get foreclosed on. [dryfly raises hand... "I do, I do..."].
The level & intensity of the response to this post tells me Tanta hit the bullseye.
Oh ya - and let me just make my point clear - vandalism isn't 'right' or 'justifiable'... neither is road rage... but that isn't the same as saying it doesn't exist or that it doesn't have root causes.
Great article. Good piece of writing...all good pieces of writing should leave the reader hanging out there. And there are many comments here I found quite insightful and well-written...AND funny. I'm a new fan of this blog.
OT,
Hey Dry. Remember when you and I were not impressed by the HD share buyback? We both indicated we'd take the dividend?? I had indicated that I wasn't sure anyone at the SEC was following up to make sure companies were carrying through the plans.
Have a look at this: Shaky HD Supply deal threatens big buyback plan - MarketWatch
Dear Tanta,
Perhaps an inappropriate letter salutation for a comment, but it will have to do (frag?).
I enjoy your posts and the spirited discussion (cliche?), and I read your every post (compound sentence).
Strunk or Strunk and White are wonderful as an inoculation against some of their own injunctions. On writing with too many words, one of my teachers in graduate school used to refer to this thought and wonder: "What is the worry?--that we will run out?" (punctuation). For those who object to the length, I would offer that no one asks, begs or forces them to read the blog or your thoughts, so if they keep coming back, they have few grounds for complaint--obviously they get something from the experience, even if it is only the provocation they need to vent their feelings over English (see below) "as she should be wrote."
The bits of discussion on empathy and sympathy in the first two-thirds of the comments (I confess to having read only that far) were very interesting to me, an aging and aged student of the moral sentiments. The thread might not live up to your expectations, but I found it fascinating as far as I have read and will return to it.
Enough of me and thank you very kindly for the provocation (R.W. Emerson on the word; and another flag on punctuation).
Best,
Haralambos (a professional editor) (not likely the appropriate closing)(more Strunk and White rules needed for parentheses) (yet more needed for the use of [sic]). I will close after this digression, and I am tempted to add the smiley face, but I will not.
Remember, from a renter's point of view: the more that real estate crashes, the better.
I thought rents were supposed to be leading indicators, not trailing indicators... In particular, at least here near SF Bay what's been weird about The Bubble is, unlike the steep price run-ups in the late '80s and late '90s, The Bubble wasn't preceded by steep rent increases. Rents were stable ever since the dot.bomb. That's one reason I believed Krugman's Bubble Warnings. Now I'm told rents are increasing, even as home prices crash. I'm not sure how this helps local renters.
I read it three times. "I don't get it!" Why write like that? Should I be impressed? I would have to say I am, but just because my prose sucks and I studied it to see if I could pick out some tips. Sorry but Strunk & White got me through my engineering school's technical writing requirement so hey quit bashing them. Is this an example of how a higher mind communicates? I'm honestly asking because I'll never be able to write like that. I enjoyed it but was left feeling sort of inadequate.
Anyway, my brother and his buddies got busted in the 70's for thrashing a very nice custom house in Carlsbad CA after HS graduation. I think it was a rebellion thing myself. But you might be onto something with this performance art suggestion. People might be willing to pay to see an abandoned house get thrashed if its done real highbrow like.
TANSTAAFL. Now that definitely violates the nutshell rule of words to live by.
Perhaps but Robert Heinlein spent a whole novel explaining the concept. And rambled in a few places explaining how a computer could become sentient by adding a few boxes of memory and random number generators.
The value of Strunk and White is that my professor wanted me to use it so I did to get committee approval of the thesis. Now it sits on the shelf, ignored like all the rest.
and out of the mouths of babes came wisdom.
So true, which is why we read all of Tanta's words with such devotion.
If you dont get this, then my guess is that you also dont get psychology, ethology, history, economics, political science or Janis Joplin.
One of the most dangerous things that can be done is to put an organism, whether animal, human, state, or corporate, into a position where it has nothing to lose.
When pushed up tight against the wall, any organism is going to resort to desperate measures. When cornered, even a mild animal will attack. With nothing to lose, gamblers, rogue traders and corporations take on rapidly increasing levels of risk just to try to put off the inevitable. With nothing to lose, armies, from Thermopylae to the Alamo, fight to the death. Backed into a corner societies turn to charismatic demagogues like Robespierre, Hitler, Castro and Chavez or to economic systems like communism just to try to relieve their suffering. With nothing left to lose, normally well-behaved, law abiding people grab the torches and pitchforks, man the barricades, burn the cities, erect the guillotines and, yes, even feel free to punch holes in the pink walls that were recently the room of their little daughter.
The reason cash offers to leave the property in an orderly, undamaged fashion work is that they give the occupant something to lose. Without that, its only natural that they feel free to act out their frustration, disappointment and anger at a process that has done them, and a terrible number of other Americans, a great deal of harm.
As the incomparable Janis sang Freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose.
Oops . . . that philosophy fits in a nutshell with a couple of BR and a bath to spare.
OT,
Hey Dry. Remember when you and I were not impressed by the HD share buyback? We both indicated we'd take the dividend?? I had indicated that I wasn't sure anyone at the SEC was following up to make sure companies were carrying through the plans.
Have a look at this: Bad Request 7D
lama | 03.30.08 - 4:31 pm | #
Thanks lama - getting crazier for sure.
I sure miss banker (Mr. Buy-Back-Always-Good himself)... I'd love to ask him if he now thinks those buyback plans a year ago were smart or if those companies should have held their cash?
CathyG, lovely exposition of what's waiting for us on the other side of "NO BAILOUT": NO EXIT.
Janis is not covered by the nutshell rule because she was smart enough not to be offering a "philosophy." She stuck to art, which is a whole nuther matter.
If real estate crashes, which it is...unemployment will increase which it is...and everyone will be at risk of insolvency which they already are. Careful what you wish for...but some people who have no mortgage or savings, maybe don't care what happens to consumer/workers exposed to graet risk of collapse. Again in the middle class and below are cannabalizing and condemning each other. This works for the maintaining THE system. We are becoming a numbed down society of bitterness for our neighbors. Look up the ranks to see what's what really wrong with our 'globalized' economy.
Janis is not covered by the nutshell rule because she was smart enough not to be offering a "philosophy." She stuck to art, which is a whole nuther matter.
ooh, close but no cigar. you would have got a gold star if you had said: "...which is a whole nutter matter."
If real estate crashes, which it is...unemployment will increase which it is...and everyone will be at risk of insolvency which they already are.
There's lots of remodeling going on in the neighborhood...nonetheless, there's also plenty of people ringing doorbells handing out business cards and wanting to know if they can remodel something. I'm guessing whatever remodeling is going on can't begin to keep up with the loss of new house construction jobs in the exurbs.
Keep It Simple, I'm Stupid writes:
dryfly, what do you plan to do in the off-season?
Keep It Simple, I'm Stupid | Homepage | 03.30.08 - 5:25 pm | #
Work... and fish some... and read CR. Won't be long though & we'll be reading about the incoming recruits & hoping they can fill some holes. They got holes they need to fill - BC sure proved that.
Re: Anti-Boomer Comments
Baby Boomers are the driving force behind America. You're really going to effin' tell me that "the blame starts on top" when the generation that has the power, and will hold onto the power due to demographics is all set to make sure they don't get any of the negative effects of their choices? The same generation that has basically repeated over and over "if you vote for a third party candidate you are throwing away your vote" keep believing that because somepoint everyone who says that is going to die and be replaced by people who believe that those who were labeled as "crackpots" are actually pretty rational.
You're telling me the people who were conceived and lived under boomer-rule can't make a reasonable judgements about their parents? The same boomers who gave trophies and ribbons to everyone? The same boomers who care more about making sure everyone makes it from 1st to 6th grade in 6 years instead of legitimately holding people back? The same boomers who have driven our divorce rate up due to their own selfishness? The same boomers who bombard everyone else with their ED pills? The same boomers who do buy their teenagers BMWs, Mercedes Benz, Audi's... heck the fact that its so common for teenagers to even have cars (I think my children are going to be locked up)... the same boomers who are so delusional that their children are "good children" when most of are fools who love to drink and sleep with as many members of the opposite sex as they can (I'm sure for 15 years this has been called "college", but I don't think college was the same in 1970 as it is now)... the same boomers who look down on poor people and who started the whole political divide in the first place (hey you don't have to buy the BS that liberals and conservatives are so different... I know many co-workers with different fews and they are all decent people... so why do our leaders love to push those polarizing issues in front of us?).
These same boomers are going to lead us from the ashes, solve all of our problems, punish the people who they haven't punished for 20 years plus? Hah! Of course the boomers are the least impacted by all of this housing stuff because they are the ones who were first time buyers 30 years ago... and they are also the ones who told everyone "housing prices can only go up". So in some way boomers suck because they don't realize the fact that their generation is so huge has caused a bit of a housing bubble... and they are trying to keep their housing prices inflated due to personal self-interest... sighsighsighsighsigh...
Someone convince me that the collective boomers aren't the ones who have been driving this country off a cliff for the past 10-15 years... what other demographics are the driving force behind all of this? They have the money, the power positions... everything... and you're going to tell me boomers aren't pushing all of the bills into the next generation?
At the risk of offending Tanta, I am going to say that I am tired of these "I am way smarter than anyone else" type of posts. Deconstructing a 5 line post for 2 hours? Come on ... do something useful with your brain.
I have any number of character flaws--I suppose the ability to generate lots of uproar over a couple of lines of text is one of them--but getting "offended" is not usually my style. If by that you mean taking these disagreements personally. I'll certainly enter the fray and give as good as I get, but trotting out the "you offended me" card isn't my cup of self-pity.
You are free to dish it out as much as you like. I may dish back if I get bored enough, but I promise not to stalk out in a huff because you've upset my tender sensibilities. Fair enough?
Otherwise, I have no real idea how to respond to such a backhanded "compliment," so I just generally don't. I guess I'm not grateful enough that you acknowledge that I have a brain that I will knuckle under and display it in a less provocative manner. I admit I have some experience with the "you should be doing something better with your time/talent/energy/life than whatever it is you happen to be doing right now" bit of "well-meaning" advice, and that experience has never been good.
So if you do think I'm being a touch self-indulgent by writing something like this on a blog, I'd hardly disagree. Whether I need to indulge you instead is, of course, the interesting question.
Or as was said in another time, in another place, "On n'a rien a gagner a emmerder les gens qui n'ont rien a perdre."
So, I read Megan's burp, (I thought they only had "Megans" on TV,) hoping for some profundity. OK, not profundity; maybe a second paragraph.
Alas, I shrugged.
The "not getting it" is the privileged class's inability to place themselves in any other milieu but their pampered surroundings. Interesting to see similar reactions here.
"I didn't get caught up in the mess. So those people must be stupid, or worse, cupid.
They shouldn't have tired to buy a house if they couldn't read through thirty pages of legalese." (when they were hammered incessantly by swifties screaming NINJA or forever be priced out!)
"That could never happen to me." Sure. Right.
The rank insensitivity to where most* of the culpability lies betrays the lack of mere vestiges of empathy.
"most" applies to contributory negligence. The losers brought it on themselves by participating. Nyuk. Nyuk.
Read up some time on how the Railroad Barons used to rob widows. Showing up for work constituted 1% cn; a catastrophe for the widows.
I must have been ensconced in the basement the day the planes flew over, emitting those clouds of vapor that wafted down and gave everyone else amnesia. Because, you know, I clearly remember all those citizens' groups pooling their rolled pennies, nickels, and dimes to bombard the banks and mortgage companies with radio and TV campaigns begging the banks to lend every last dollar they could invent.
The sad fact is that bad things do happen to good people. I'd venture to guess that bad things might just happen to good people more often because they don't have their guard up, looking for the con.
If people knew more than their lawyers, they wouldn't need them. If they knew more than their banker, they wouldn't need them either.
Tanta is dead on right and frankly, it's about time people started calling out those who write and "report" under fancy mastheads. mcmegan is the intellectual equivalent of a Happy Meal and about as mentally nutritious.
Tanta, it was a brilliant post and well written. The humour was spot on and your point was correct. How about "shove it up your @ss" in response to these mewling detractors?
Ummm, YLSP, I'm a boomer and I didn't do any of those things either.
As far as I can see, virtually all ranks and ages in our country participated in the nonsense to a degree--why are you so bitter? In fact, I marvelled at the fact that so many young marrieds expected to buy a house upon marriage; I certainly didn't expect that. We lived in a $75.00 a month (including utilities) walk up apt in Balto in '66 when we got married. Just under the roof--the tarred roof--with no ac. We were however, happy.
We occasionally walked a few blocks in the snow.
We bought a nice house 4 years later,hated the small town it was in. Left and bought a cheapie and went to night school and worked all day in Miami. We were happy. Very tired, but happy.
I am not asking for any gold (or glod) stars, we just worked our way up as we were told way the way to do it.
Some people in all generations are jerks.
And I'm not just cheezin'.
And I don't see any even slightly funny put-downs or amusing irony in your rant.
The post was supposed to be somewhat related to humor.
I apologise for straying off topic and probably feeding trolls, but the anti baby-boomer comments on this and other blogs are (I hope) worthy of comment.
Get used to it....
There are a lot of us that have come to hate everything that the boomers have come to stand for.
The richest generation in the richest country in the entire world; the recipient of the one-time generational dividend; the generation that was going to change the world; and they blew it.
And now you're surprised that the rest of us. The ones that the boomers figured they could stick with the bill aren't happy about it.
There is a generational war coming and guess what, you're going to need us more than we need you.
Generational War is B.S. Clue: The following generation eventually inherits everything the previous generation.
Now, granted, a given generation can invest in consumption and not capital, resulting in a larger coffin for granddad but sh-ttier schools for his grandchildren, but I've seen nothing to indicate that Gens X & Y are any superior to the BB. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I have been buying foreclosure properties for more than ten years, and has seen the inside of roughly 500 properites in their raw (before being fixed up) condition. I have seen probably two properites that were intentionally vandalized. Although I may frequently use the term 'trashed' to describe a property where everything needs to be replaced to make it saleable, more often than not the wear on the house is the result of deferred maintenance and/or heavy wear from teenage boys. This vandilism problem you speak of just doesn't exist where I live.
just when I thought it was safe to skip CR to catch up on a home improvement project (I know...'big waste of time'-save it.) I see I missed out on a great post and some 300 comments of lively discussion.
I really loved 'trash-out refi', btw, and I recommend Tanta just take full credit for that one, even if she didn't technically come up with it herself. Alexander Graham Bell didn't invent the telephone either, but nodoby seems to care that Antonio Meucci got shafted on that one.
touche
good morning Tanta! Sorry, this is off topic, but i didn't know you were also working as a medical transcriptionist...
Medical transcriptionist melts keyboard with fingertips - Boing Boing
Wow, or Yikes... quite a post. Tanta, they need to modify the 50's hit for you, to... "You write too much, you worry me to death, you write too much you even worry my pet..."
These people are looking for and getting revenge. It's not new, as you pointed out.
There was an angry seller (in the 80s) I knew of who ripped all the copper wiring out at the last minute. Buyer didn't notice, damage not visible, until he was gone.
A foreclosee in the mid 80s who had ripped out the entire inside of the house, not just punched in some drywall. I saw pictures. It was amazing.
A guy in the 90s who also ripped out the entire inside of the house. Not mad at the lender, mad at the world; he died of AIDS. Also, he was a decorator, so there is some thought he intended to fix it up again.
in the early 2000s, to get down to the silly, a client asked me if she could replace her fancy Mexican hand-painted drawer knobs in her bathroom, and another who wanted to take down hunter fans & put up cheap ones. I said you're on your own. She did take the knobs and nobody said anything. The original fans were left at my urging.
I imagine ripping things up is very satisfying to a certain type of person.
Also, the banks are letting more houses rot, than are being destroyed by angry borrowers. I personally know of several, and I'm sure Cobra Driver could tell us of many.
The problem is that these whiners (both reckless borrowers and foolish lenders) are DEMANDING that society as a whole bail them out. In fact, that process is underway...I am getting hit as a taxpayer and in my dollar savings. So I have an emotional, unsympathetic reaction-- NO BAILOUT for the jerks on Wall Street and their deadbeat borrower partners in crime.
--
"However, I for one did argue, quite early in this mess, that 1) housing policy is political in this country and 2) financial crises are even more so and that therefore 3) whether or not it "should" be that way is immaterial; it is so. The housing bust and the debt bubble pop have been and are going to remain political footballs for the foreseeable future."
Dear Tanta,
This mess was turned into a criminal (I mean unethical to the limit) activity fully supported, or encouraged, by the Fed and the USG for the benefit of business groups (Hopebuilders, Bankrupters, Fraudsters, etc) and at the full expense of the American People, in general.
That must inform you as to what kind of econo-political system we do have (not the fantasy version you were taught as a child). It is as corrupt as any in the world today. In a bad system bad practices are the norm.
Jas
People hate it when they find out they have been had. The ponzi economy sucked a lot of lower income people in and made them think they too could join the world of the rich and famous. There is a bitterness building that will have dark implications in the future. Tanta scores again!
Sorry, this is off topic, but i didn't know you were also working as a medical transcriptionist...
Wow. I don't actually have any holes in my keys yet. Maybe I don't try hard enough.
Actually I have this terrible habit of curling my right hand into a fist and literally banging on the "enter" key (the one on the far right, on the number pad). It comes from those years of using a ten-key desktop calculator and, well, having an increasing sense of doom and/or rage growing in you as you see the running total rising or falling. By the time you get to "grand total" and that "enter" key, it's Hostility time.
So my "enter" key is in bad shape, but I haven't melted it yet. Good heavens.
I feel an Unskilled and Unaware post coming on.
I still think those couple of posts are some of the best on CR.
I have the paper on the desktops of my computers to open it up and remind myself.
Wow!
With "Mark to Market" and "Jas Jain" coming in at less than 20 minutes on a post that tries to get the mean-spirited and the terminally humorless to stop for a minute and think about it, I believe we have just set some kind of internet record.
Does anyone know how you get in touch with the Guiness Book of Blog Records?
I'll reiterate.
Tanta, just go ahead and recycle the unskilled and unaware pieces.
I suppose I could write you a loan that involved my promising to hand over an asset that I already owned to myself--that'll teach me!--in the event that you fail to pay me back as agreed.
When I fail to meet my annual savings goal, I have to fine myself! Works every time.
You might consider it a kind of performance art of the gallows-humor subgenre.
Classic.
weilding the English language like that
"i" before "e" except after "w".
--
The Motive Behind the Mess
Without this mess creating big economic boom in 2003, led by emergency Fed Funds Rate policy," Greenspan would not have been reappointed in June 2004, Bush would not have been re-elected in late 2004, and Bernanke would not be the Fed Chairman today.
So, you can see where the impetus for this mess came from. It is very important to understand the root causes. I call this era in American history as the Rule of the Evildoers
Jas
Anybody sold any "scrap" metal lately? Aluminum cans are bringing $.50/lb, but thats chicken scratch compared to aluminum wire and copper of any type! Copper plumbing pipe fetches close to $1.80/lb, and pipe is dense and heavy. Maybe those people "trashing" the 'ol homestead are just taking their equity with them.
I feel an Unskilled and Unaware post coming on.
Now, now. It will do no good to repost that one. If they didn't get it then, they'll fail to get it again. And that way lies the only laugh I'm likely to get today.
--
Showing your true colors, Tanta?
Jas
lawyerliz: the banks are letting more houses rot, than are being destroyed by angry borrowers.
In subzero cold, the banks forget that someone needs to keep the place warm, lest the pipes freeze. Etc.
Folks have been known to leave the water, um, running, too. An ice palace in no time!
Hear on a podcast the other day that up to 40% of the growth in home ownership since 2000 was from immigration. Imagine that you've managed to get over here, bought your piece of the American dream and then had it "snatched away from you". Especially after everybody and his brother (and TV and radio) has been telling you how smart you were to sign on that dotted line....
Reckon I'd feel like I'd been shafted, be pretty bitter and want to do some damage, too.
Well, it is leagally crime to destroy and/or damage the property intentionally during BK.
Though the banks dont persue this people now, there comes time when banks will go after this peple for the damage. This damage cant be wiped out by BK.
In otherwords, very soon I do expect some startup company to come forward and video tape the entire house/condo before the owner vacates.
Then they will ask the banks to share the profit with them from the money they will be persuing from the vandelizers legally.
For banks, any money from this way is profit and they would let third party to do this.
It is only the matter of how many incidents it happens to reach critical mass.
It is dangerous for the people who have non-recourse loan and vandelize than the people who have recourse loan.
Simple, the non-recourse people has more money which they haven't spent on paying their loans.
Also the people who has recourse-loans will have a lien held on their future income.
Guys, for heven sake dont be stupid to damage the properties when u leave. It is easy to escape during boom than during bust.
although i do fear that that was an intentional spelling given the sentence it happens to be in, Tanta's nerdiness, and the title of the post.
Quote Details: William Strunk Jr.: Vigorous writing is concise.... - The Quotations Page
In the bust I saw in the 80's entire subdivisions were trashed and then sold for 17 cents on the dollar there is nothing new here and this is what I would have expected. Human nature never changes.
Well written, Tanta!
In any society, there are always those who aren't as smart and/or lucky as others. A sane society doesn't try to cheat its most vulnerable members.
Money may be the grease of the wheels of commerce but humor is lubricant that keeps civilization from seizing.
The humor I see is irony. The investment and commercial banks made out like bandits from the dot.com boom. They got overconfident in their own schemes and now they reap the rewards. It's the same joke as the man who logically proves that God doesn't exist because of the creation of the Babelfish (Babel fish) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Destruction of another's property is a crime (begging the question of ownership). Fraud by enticement and theft by deception are crimes.
Never assume that incompetence and/or ineptitude and/or stupidity is to blame when a loss of money or value is involved.
There is no honor among snakes.
The only victims here are the innocent bystanders.
That said...a mortgage broker, an investment banker and a settlement attorney walk into a bar...
"A sane society doesn't try to cheat its most vulnerable members."
So what does that tell you?
although i do fear that that was an intentional spelling given the sentence it happens to be in, Tanta's nerdiness, and the title of the post.
No, it wasn't. And the sad part is that I actually did remember to run the spell-checker. I think I just didn't click my mouse hard enough on the correct choice. For someone whose reputation for banging hard on keyboards is well-established, that might be kinda funny. But if so, the joke's on me.
(Relying on a spell-checker, which I usually refuse to do, is how I got an "I" when I needed an "a" in another part of the post. "I" is, of course, spelled correctly.)
A sane society doesn't try to cheat its most vulnerable members.
Oh, Hysterian, that is so pre-Bush era! I have fond memories of that time, too.
Also, the banks are letting more houses rot, than are being destroyed by angry borrowers. I personally know of several, and I'm sure Cobra Driver could tell us of many.
lawyerlizSee how Countrywide treated their million dollar asset until shamed into responsibility: Exurban Nation: 410 Avocado Place 93010 Koi Edition
and: Exurban Nation: 410 Avocado Place 93010 Inside Edition
Treat the bank's property the way they would treat it themselves is my motto.
i also refuse to use spell-checker. "dreamz" with an "s"? i don't think so, microsoft.
Nemo, I don't know if Bill Strunk ever did catch on to the . . . irony . . . of making "rules" for "good writing" that require all good writing to be of the same kind.
I don't actually care, either. The tyranny of the Strunk-worshippers is way past its sell-by date, and ridicule is the kindest thing we can heap on it.
Once upon a time, in a land far away, there were multiple styles and genres and conventions of discourse. A famous one was called "baroque." (No, really. Look it up.) It went out of fashion as an earnest discursive style, not coincidentally when the precursors of the Strunk-tyrants decided that everyone had to go for lean and mean and stripped-down in order to flatter their own desires to legislate aesthetics as well as morality.
After a while, of course, the baroque resurfaced as a tool wielded--hopefully with the i and the e in the right place--by the subversive-minded who have pretty much had it with pedestrian thinkers and aesthetic amateurs bonking us over the knuckles with a copy of The Elements of Style.
A moral could, in fact, be extracted from the story. Like, don't mess with someone who has read Sir Thomas Browne.
Now, S N up there at 10:19 is pretty funny. Borat does economics? Or just some garden-variety nitwit who fails to understand "risk" and "property rights"? It's so deliciously undecidable. Paging Dr. Heisenberg!
""Jas Jain writes:
Without this mess creating big economic boom in 2003, led by emergency Fed Funds Rate policy," Greenspan would not have been reappointed in June 2004, Bush would not have been re-elected in late 2004, and Bernanke would not be the Fed Chairman today.""
Jas, the 2004 election was 'crookeder' than my dog's hind leg. Just like the 2000 'selection.' The folks in the US aren't as dumb as they seem.
They begin to grasp that they had only ever been given a short-term lease on the "American Dream," not a piece of the "ownership society" pie.
Um, no. What they were given was an opportunity that they abused by buying something they could not afford, because they hoped it would make them wealthy.
I have no sympathy for these people, and neither should anybody else. This is not about making jokes or making fun of anybody. This is about the political question of whether it is reasonable, sane, or fair to spend so much as a penny of taxpayer money bailing these speculators out. (Yes, buying a house you could never afford makes you a "speculator".)
So sure, let's reward everybody who got greedy at the expense of those who saved responsibly. Oh wait, that sounds insane, so to make it politically feasible you first have to paint the greedy as "victims", and write long screeds decrying how they are being "made fun of" by all the mean self-absorbed taxpayers.
Yes, somehow, we have to get from "greedy person now engaging in petty vandalism" to "victim". This is impossible to do succinctly, so we wind up with twelve paragraphs...
Far OT, but is the haircut that UBS is giving some of their brokerage accounts unprecedented?
Tanta, I LOVE YOU. You "get it" and your brain power shows a clean heart. Please..., Can you be my President? I hope someday more people like you are entrusted to lead the rest of us into a world of collective awareness and a healthy pursuit of equilibrium.
Maybe, I am too much an idealist. But the reality is that we need to change our ways for the better of all.
I pity they, poor of spirit and imagination who cannot think of but one way to spel a word.
Spoken by someone who just spent $15 yesterday at a yard sale for a pristine 1949 2nd ed of Webster's Unabridged. 3210 pages of wordy goodness.
Shorter Nemo: You need to take out all of the parts of the post that aren't validating my point of view. It would make more sense to me that way.
Is "Trash Out Refinancing" another Tanta original? I don't recall seeing it before. I think i've learned more new words and phrases on this blog than I did studying for the SAT's (still remember "miasma", the rest are long gone)
Hysterian writes:
Well written, Tanta!
In any society, there are always those who aren't as smart and/or lucky as others. A sane society doesn't try to cheat its most vulnerable members.
Hysterian | 03.30.08 - 10:24 am | #
The problem is there is no 100% sane society.
Is it just me, or is there some confusion as to when a 'trash out' has occurred?
Is this leaving behind a lot of junk or unwanted stuff, especially when you have a house full of said stuff and have to move, um, quickly?
Was this done by the homeowners or by someone to whom they had rented the house before it was foreclosed?
They use the term 'tenant', after all.
Does this also encompass vandalism by burglers and such who ransack an abandoned house or use it to party, etc?
You still have a trashed house at the end, but causes and effects are still important when trying to evaluate the problem, especially when some are using this to moralize.
One thing I loved about 70s vintage NPR All Things Considered was the programmers' willingness to devote fifteen or twenty minutes to a topic if it took that long to flesh out the tale or to talk with people who could help debunk some commonly held view in serious need of attention.
Proust trumps Strunk? Yup.
Is "Trash Out Refinancing" another Tanta original?
I don't think I made that up. But at a certain point it becomes hard to tell. Is there a kind of crypto-cryptamnesia? Forgetting that you actually made something up by rememebering falsely that you read it somewhere else? If there isn't, can I patent it?
I think the phrase "trash out" gets used a lot. I am willing to take credit for trying to work out the implications of the pun "trash out refinance." Using literally "brute force" to "re-write" the terms of the loan. But I'll defer to anyone who beat me to that.
"trash-out refinances"
darn, 12th percentile beat me to it.
this to me was the money phrase if you will...
made the 12 paragraphs worth it! (wink-n-smile).
Nemo, do you really not get that somebody can be victimizer and victim at that same time? That's it's downright common for victimizers to be or to have been victims?
Wow. You be a smart girlz.
Methinks this was a big picture post.
So, you have a society which contains significant percentages of people who believe that:
The Rapture is coming. They are entitled. The sq. footage of your house is an indicator of your status and success. I've got a 4,000 sq. foot "winkie!" How about you? Ah, such a little guy. Well, some women love landscapping.
You have an undercurrent of resentment. Especially by white people who because of demographics are feeling endangered. Then, add the "Mad Max" wannabees who sit at home playing with their Glocks.
To keep this short we are on the way to having a large population who feels "It was stabbed in the back." This is not going to lead to flowers in the hair and really good bands.
I feel trashed out by all this mortgage meltdown, financial crisis, subprime, no down payment ARM reset, monoline, hedge fund, MBS, no doc loan, fraudoorall
Shorter Nemo: You need to take out all of the parts of the post that aren't validating my point of view. It would make more sense to me that way.
Well, at least that was concise.
Now let me see...
Paragraphs 1-4: Long description of what you are not going to discuss.
Paragraphs 5-6: Introduction
Paragraphs 7-11: People took out loans to buy houses "at cost" with no down payment. Now they are mad because everybody who said they were being stupid are turning out to be right.
Paragraphs 12-13: Anyone who says he "have no sympathy" is overestimating the importance of his own feelings.
Paragraphs 14-15: Actually, he is really trying to make fun of the poor victim borrowers, in an attempt to prevent right-wing "free market" economists (the real villains) from looking stupid for advocating all this "Ponzi finance" in the first place.
Paragraphs 16-19: Being the butt of jokes makes the poor victims want to trash the bank's house.
OK, I think I get your point.
And mine is that you are seriously misunderstanding -- or just misrepresenting -- what people like me are thinking when we say "I have no sympathy".
P.S. I hope the vandals see jail time. Now THAT would be funny.
"sane"
There's that word again.
Is it just me, or is there some confusion as to when a 'trash out' has occurred?
I'm not in the mood to call it "confusion" today. I'm in the mood to call it willful failure to recognize that we are interpreting this humorless thing called "reality," not simply recording it like a good camera.
Of course these things are often "undecidable." As Fair Economist notes, terms like "victim" and "victimizer" are a bit slippery, too. That real world does have a stubborn way of making hash out of our more simple-minded pronunciamentos about it. (No. Really. Sometimes nice guys finish first. The world can always surprise you if you're an idiot.)
The big problem with The Elements of Style, besides the monumental hubris of thinking there is only one "style," is the equally monumental delusion that everyone is trying to write about something that can be stated in six words or less.
A former professor of mine kept a poster on his wall that said, "Any philosophy that can fit in a nutshell belongs there." Words of wisdom.
What I also "get" is that here you have a classic example of where the rush to start making a list of people you don't have any "sympathy" for gets you: nowhere, fast
A long list of lack-of-sympathy gets you to Glibertarian Land, of which McCardle is the reigning media queen.
As a left libertarian, right libertarians strike me quite like the bolsheviks struck the mensheviks; irreconcilable factions of radical movements as a rule simply detest each other, often more than members of more polar opposite movements.
I think the phrase "trash out" gets used a lot. I am willing to take credit for trying to work out the implications of the pun "trash out refinance." Using literally "brute force" to "re-write" the terms of the loan. But I'll defer to anyone who beat me to that.
google comes up < a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22trash-out+refinancing%22&btnG=Search">empty.
empty
o, the joke's on me, who tried to buy a house in 05 and thought the things were just cwazee and decided to wait it out... looks like the bailout's not for me.
"the rush to start making a list of people you don't have any "sympathy" for gets you: nowhere, fast"
Tell that to the guy with the AK-47
"I have no sympathy for these people, and neither should anybody else."
Really? Not even karmic prophylactic sympathy? Not even like, it's in my own self interest to cut a little slack to someone who misjudged his own margin of error in case I ever misjudge my own? Your reach never exceeded your grasp on anything? What a dour world you must inhabit.
I think we all should have sympathy for "these people." Even the speculators and the flip this property types. Even the young recently unemployed mba's. Didn't anyone ever describe to you what a breadline looks like? Or the spectacle of apple sellers hawking for their literal survival?
A little more sympathy, a little less self righteous holier-than-thou, and we might struggle through this mess and imagine how to avoid a similar one anytime soon.
Fair Economist --
Nemo, do you really not get that somebody can be victimizer and victim at that same time? That's it's downright common for victimizers to be or to have been victims?
Sure. But I do not believe foreclosed homeowners are "victims". I believe people are responsible for their own actions. (But then, I believe Bear Stearns should have been allowed to fail. Privatize the profits, privatize the losses...)
I object to any attempt to justify the actions of vandals on the grounds that they are just mad because the mean, heartless "conservatives" are "making fun of them".
Tanta could have started and ended with "Megan McArdle is an idiot". That would have been both shorter and completely uncontroversial. But Tanta went on to explain how she "understands" why someone would want to trash their house because of comments like Megan McArdle's. On that, I call BS.
to topic:
I, like many people, fall prey to whether or not the "victim" is a "victim".
it clouds my understanding of what is, and what should be done.
and thus I've tried to separate arguments when I think of this topic, as I've found there are several DIFFERENT aspects to the idea.
1) is the victim a "victim"?
2) what should our response to this be?
as time has gone on I've realized that most of the time there really is no way to discern if the victim is a victim... it's pointless. often it seems to me that the victim is a victim, but also partially culpable nonetheless.
thus, I've found that I can have empathy with those involved (borrowers, tenants, lenders, investors, etc) without absolving them of their culpability in the situation.
but this line of reasoning may be separated from whether or not I have a fiduciary duty to help in their cause- EVEN THOUGH I understand fully that their cause directly affects me.
I believe it is possible to have empathy for those involved but still feel that I have no fiducicary duty to them.
so for the borrowers:
-give them legal address in court
-if they are destitute, give them the most basic of food and shelter (which is why Jesus created welfare and food banks and all that, and why I support those enterprises with my tax dollars and my votes.)
For the lenders/investors, etc
-give them legal address in court
-if they go BK based on all this, allow them the protections that Allah gave corporations in his wisdom.
as for the rest:
I don't agree with all the financial shenanigans being done to "save me" from "systemic risk" (that they ironically caused), so I'll pass on all that.
P.S. I hope the vandals see jail time. Now THAT would be funny.
Perfect example of how a mere sense of hostility masquerades as a sense of humor.
As someone who never appreciated slapstick in the slightest, I can see where you're coming from. There is certainly a tradition in this culture of finding the infliction of pain on others a big yuk. If you can drag out some hoary watered-down concept of "poetic justice" for something that is neither the one or the other, you can claim to be at least a middle-brow, not just the kind of low-brow who finds the Three Stooges a real scream and wants front-row tickets to the comeuppance of these people who are vandalizing their own property.
Scratch a libertarian and you get someone who really does want the government to interfere in property rights: at the point where your exercise of those rights might cost your corporate betters a repair invoice.
among the best pieces i have read in my life.
Perfect example of how a mere sense of hostility masquerades as a sense of humor.
Oh come on, that last line was a deliberate attempt to yank your chain. Sigh. Too easy.
Would you care to respond to any of my actual, you know, points?
It is going one big scratch and claw show. Go ahead and be "holier than my cat." This is going to continue to get snowball* and many of those who thought they would be untouched will find themselves in the big litter box of life.
One of the things I like about Tanta's posts is that she never forgets that we are dealing with Human beings in all their absurdity and glory.This mess affects all of us,and there will be profound social changes due to this misallocation of resources and the anger of the people who have been had.Does anyone here think that there hasn't been literal "blood in he streets" already ?if only caused by someone in despair who got behind the wheel of a car after taking a few drinks? Or the retirees who thought their brokers put them in safe investments only to find out that they had better start taste testing cat food? more poor people crowded together mean more drug resistant TB...I have certainly made my share of disastrous financial decisions (My Marriage,now over)and I don't have any desire to blame the folks who bought into the big lie.I do think it is vital to understand the situation in order to mitigate the damage to our society,and to ensure that similar situations do not arise quickly.It will be interesting,and I intend to enjoy the more absurd and ironic aspects of the show,but it is about real people with real lives,and a LOT of very real pain for everyone.
S N writes:
In otherwords, very soon I do expect some startup company to come forward and video tape the entire house/condo before the owner vacates.
Better yet, another line of insurance to be tacked onto the closing costs.
"Any philosophy that can fit in a nutshell belongs there." Words of wisdom.
Perhaps, although a few paragraphs and epigrams often contain far more truth than vast philosophical tracts.
The halting problem (about the profoundest thing my little brain can understand) can fit on an index card, for example.
If anything, most academics (and some bloggers wink) seem guilty of the opposite sin to me.
Cheers,
prat
Scratch a libertarian and you get someone who really does want the government to interfere in property rights
that, plus you get libertarian cooties. ew!
Open question to Nemo:
do you have empathy (as opposed to sympathy) for these people (victim or not)?
and open question to Tanta:
is your ire as piqued against those of us who have empathy but not necessarily sympathy for these "victims"?
because I can CERTAINLY empathize with a lot of those deeply involved.
I can understand why the borrowers overextended themselves, why the loan officers approved the deals, why the securitizers passed the garbage through, why the ratings agencies did what they did, why the Fed looked the other way, and so on.
I DON'T necessarily sympathize with any of them. (depends on the exact situation, which is rarely if ever known to me).
Don't forget the kittens!
Scratch a libertarian and you get someone who really does want the government to interfere in property rights: at the point where your exercise of those rights might cost your corporate betters a repair invoice.
Humoress, humor thyself.
Cheers,
prat
Let's see....a real estate related joke....
How many lawyers does it take to shingle a roof?
Depends how thin you slice them!
Scratch a libertarian and you get someone who really does want the government to interfere in property rights: at the point where your exercise of those rights might cost your corporate betters a repair invoice.
Tanta, maybe you should try half-decaf. Libs advocate minimum government participation. Hardly the same thing. In fact you make a common mis-generalization of what zoning actually does. There is a voluntary exchange of land use rights. Accepting restrictions on your activities grants in turn a right to quiet enjoyment. It is only the recent decades when planners and municipalities started using planning as a blunt social agenda tool that the idea of zoning as restriction has taken hold.
Tanta, doesnt the mortgage contract contain a clause stating that "borrower shall keep the Property in good repair and shall not commit waste or permit impairment or deterioration of the Property."
oh so very like way off topic
John Cassidy essays to tell us a great deal about E. Stanley O'Neal in the March 31 New Yorker.
Sorry, they don't offer it on line and, no, it is not brief.
Would you care to respond to any of my actual, you know, points?
No.
I dealt with the the only one worth comment. I have no intention of trying to deal with anyone who wants to diagram my sentences or outline my posts.
You are trying to get me to resolve the contraction. I am, as I mentioned in the post, trying to drag it out into the daylight and let it squirm for a while. One of us is never going to be happy here, and I think it should be you.
Yearning to Learn --
do you have empathy (as opposed to sympathy) for these people (victim or not)?
Yes, I understand how lots of people would be lured by the promise of getting rich for doing approximately nothing. And I understand how they could be mad when it doesn't work out and they lose a lot of money.
In other words, I have empathy in the same sense as I do for gamblers in Vegas. In a drunken stupor, I might even admit to a certain sympathy...
My beef comes when the politicos paint these people as "victims". Because I know what comes next.
Anonymous writes:
no, the joke's on me, who tried to buy a house in 05 and thought the things were just cwazee and decided to wait it out... looks like the bailout's not for me.
Me either, except that I bought an affordable house in an affordable neighborhood, so that I wouldn't ever have to go to sleep at night wondering if I could make the next mortgage payment.
It's tough to go in for the group hug
under the circumstances.
and lastly:
although I empathize with many of the parties, my brain rejects the attempt to overly-victimize them, for the sole reason that I fear that this victimization profile will be used in order to convince me that I must pony up more $$$ for their "cause".
and I sometimes get angry, because I fear/believe that this is exactly what is happening.
give us tales of woe about these poor borrowers so that we can create a taxpayer funded bailout of some sort.
give us tales of "hoocudanode" and "systemic risk will ruin you too" so that we agree to bail out those involved. Then try to convince us that the bailout went to the aformentioned sympathy-deserving victims, instead of where it really went: to the reckless corporations
and then when people start noticing that it was a bailout, say "well it wasn't really a bailout... you just don't understand these sorts of things."
(example: Bear Stearns. remind me again why $10/share wasn't a bailout? remind me again why their CEO just cashed out $60Million and how that's not a bailout?)
so I empathize of my own free will... but I reserve my sympathies for now...
Rob Dawg, at least two people on this thread have stated or implied that it should be illegal for people to destroy their own property.
What they mean, I must conclude, is that secured residential mortgage lending should be risk-free to lenders: you should be able to put someone into one of these "de facto lease" loans without having to risk them catching on and taking out the built-ins.
Well, there is no risk-free lunch, not even for lenders.
I should have said "glibertarian" instead of "libertarian." In any case I was aiming at someone whose grasp on this idea of the sanctity of property rights seems a touch weak.
Then again I am not a libertarian myself, at least not as the word is most typically used, so I'm probably capable of making the mistake of thinking y'all look alike. I mean, we're on the subject of making sweeping generalizations about people . . .
I have no intention of trying to deal with anyone who wants to diagram my sentences or outline my posts.
nah nah nah nah I can't hear you nah nah nah
One of us is never going to be happy here, and I think it should be you.
Actually, I am quite happy just having said my peace. I was curious if you had any rebuttal beyond name-calling. You have answered my question; thanks!
YTL,
Absolutely wonderful distinction to make: we are all greedy little curs, but that need not keep us from criticizing that fact (with humor, natch!)
Tanta is a radical liberal (I do not mean that as an insult, merely a description) and hates high-and-mightiness, which I can empathize and even sympathize with. The problem with that outlook is that the high-and-mighty are often absolutely correct about what they are being high-and-mighty about, they are just guilty of another sin: pride. The aesthetics of the discussion simply dominate: prideful mothr fkers are just intolerable a**holes and we instinctively set our stance firmly against them.
Wait, was there a joke in there? Knock knock...
Cheers,
prat
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will live as one
Now get real!
This seems like an enlightening post.
It makes the point that we all should strive to understand the situation better before passing judgment. This is especially true for journalists, who have the power to influence others through the written word.
Tanta writes:
Scratch a libertarian and you get someone who really does want the government to interfere in property rights: at the point where your exercise of those rights might cost your corporate betters a repair invoice.
You mistake Libertarian for "tax dodging Republican crybaby", but it's a common mistake.
I live in a bubble area. I hang out with civil servants. Low-paid civil servants. Teachers. Back in '04, '05, and even '05 I saw a number of them pay prices they could barely afford for the most remote or modest of homes so that they wouldn't be "priced out of the market forever." In their home county. Get it? Their home.
They thought this was their last chance to get some kind of stability, because rents were rising, too, and they might be squeezed out.
Now they're about to take it in the shorts -- not because they were greedy, but because they were desperate and everyone assured them that it was "now or never."
Some may want to reassure themselves that the fault lay in the individuals, not the system. But I see no fault in these people. In those who would judge, I see a lot of suppressed fear.
that said,
(I guess I shouldn't have said "lastly" before!!!!)
I have progressed beyond the overt BLAME that I used to have.
before, I'd see a proposed "victim" and my first subconscious reaction was to see how s/he was to blame.
(eg: last week when I asked "why doesn't she speak English")
this way I could reserve all sympathy.
now I am able to see the victim as simply a person. I can empathize without all the blame.
(eg: when I realized "hey, she would've made the same mistake with or without English, and I also signed documents at closing that I didn't fully understand")
this has freed my mind: now I don't bother trying to figure out whether or not the victim is a victim, because I'll never know anyway.
instead I can focus on my empathy for them and what should be done for them.
it's nice to get the hating out of my mind.
(I'm still upset with them all for doing this, but the hate is gone)
A national poll (by a well-respected polling firm) shows a majority of Americans believe that the Feds should let people who borrowed too much twist in the wind:
"Fifty-three percent (53%) of Americans say that the federal government should not help out homeowners who borrowed more than they could afford. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 29% disagreed and believed that federal action is appropriate. Seventeen percent (17%) are not sure."
"There is even stronger opposition to federal help for banks that made bad loans. By a 4-to-1 margin (61% to 15%) Americans reject that approach to resolving the current mortgage crisis."
Most Americans Oppose Federal Bailout for Homeowners - Rasmussen Reports™
Tanta writes:
Then again I am not a libertarian myself, at least not as the word is most typically used, so I'm probably capable of making the mistake of thinking y'all look alike. I mean, we're on the subject of making sweeping generalizations about people . . .
Apology accepted.
Ahh, the enduring good sense of the american electorate when asked if they should pay for someone else's mistakes. Just don't ask them if someone else should pay for theirs.
"Libertarian for me, but not for thee"
Cheers,
prat
I thought foreclosed tenant WAS a joke.
Silly me.
Cheers,
I always loved Strunk & White's:
Avoid Needless Words.
Avoid Needless Words.
Avoid Needless Words.
Didn't White write the Once and Future King? And so was capable of style and verve.
I've always liked Wolf? Wolfe's? baroque style, but you have to be careful; it can easily get out of hand.
Yeah, it's all fun and games to have no sympathy for a dying bull, until you find yourself being chased down a blind alley.
Tanta, when you start writing gargantuan posts on a Sunday morning to get into chicken-fights with sanctimonious posters....
I worry. I do.
As Strunk would say...
This road don't lead nowhere good.
I didn't know what foreclosed tenant meant and I suspect the writer didn't know what she meant either.
Well, there is no risk-free lunch, not even for lenders.Doesn't that violate your nutshell rule? Just kidding.
Yes to the rest, lenders are at risk. To compensate for that risk they charge interest. Lenders have no more right to risk protection than do the borrowers. If as a lender you feel you might be lending to someone who might pour cement into the toilets before defaulting then you charge more or you don't lend. There were no guns involved and the process worked pretty good for a very long time. Just because there is this new crop of streamlined lenders who ignored the rules about knowing your borrowers does not mean those rules went away.
Show your sympathy to a person who suffers but not when they spread their sufferings to others.
A person who destroys a mortgage property causes damage to the neighborhood through devaluation of other properties around. They should be socially damned.
I worked with people that bought cars on credit--knowing they couldn't afford it. Mitsubishi had no money down, no interest deals a couple of years ago. They worked the system, their cars were repossessed, they were happy to have a new car for a substantial time.
If you tempt them, they will come. Ask Mrs. Spitzer. (sorry, this is a humor diary)
You mistake Libertarian for "tax dodging Republican crybaby", but it's a common mistake.
baron samedi | 03.30.08 - 11:43 am | #
Thanks for that definition! I love it! I know many people who call themselves 'libertarian', but this term fits them better.
I suspect for most, this wasn't their first trash experience. Many of these folks probably don't think twice about dropping garbage out the window either. Another sad theme in the overall sad plot.
It's been over a year for me watching the slow moving train wreck and while my portfolio is spared, the now daily bad news and jockeying by the greedy and/or incompetent is indeed depressing.
Never been a fan of slap stick? Now I feel sorry for you. Wile E. Coyote NOT funny?
Sad.
Cheers,
Tanta, I liked the point you made, but you could have done it in 2 paragraphs instead of 200. This post was way too rambling.
I don't care what motivated the buyers or the lenders - they made their decisions. They speculated and lost (on both sides). I don't laugh at them, but I don't feel sorry for them either. They need to suck up their losses and move on, without burdening those who acted more prudently.
I'm not looking to make their loss my gain. I'm advocating keeping their loss their loss - not mine.
Never gamble what you can't afford to lose.
baron samedi,
"You mistake Libertarian for "tax dodging Republican crybaby", but it's a common mistake."
Nice. I'm going to use that. Leave your email, so I can pay for the privilege.
Cheers,
Billy,
I only get credit for inserting "Republican", the rest goes to Berke Breathed.
With "Mark to Market" and "Jas Jain" coming in at less than 20 minutes on a post that tries to get the mean-spirited and the terminally humorless to stop for a minute and think about it, I believe we have just set some kind of internet record.
Here you go, making your Sunday complete.
Actually you are right this time. I don't care what happens to these leeches in principle, it's just the whining and begging that gets old. If they took the hits from their bad investments ans STFU there would be no issue. Heck, even if they walk away and take their hits there is no issue, but they should suffer the full consequences of their actions.
But it's the way it is, way too many people want to externalize liabilities and reap free rides, actually this is the #1 trait these days, they need a little 4byclue Singapore style justice.
baron samedi,
I retract my previous offer. It's FREE!
Bwahahahahaaha!
Cheers,
Wiley Coyote was funny the first and second and third times, and then it wasn't anymore.
Altho the analogy to our economy is funny and scary.
I have never got the 3 Stooges tho I think the Whos on First think is probably not slapstick and funny if you like that kind of thing. (Apostrophe deliberately left out.)
I always thought the Stooges was a guy thing. I don't know anyone of the female persuasion who likes them.
I thought last weeks BB was particularly apropos:
404 Document Not Found
Am I allowed to be a tax dodging republican crybaby and still sympathize with the idea of that comic?
Cheers,
prat
The appellate court further noted that the court in Cornelison stated that the common law
action for waste was partially codified in Civil Code section 2929, which provides that
no person whose interest is subject to the lien of a mortgage may do any act which will
substantially impair the mortgagees security.12
http://www.firstam.com/ekcms/uploadedFiles/firstam_com/References/Reference_Articles/John_C_Murray_Reference/Foreclosures/waste.pdf
Yes, it is illegal to destroy/damage your property while lien is held on it.
Yes, it is illegal to destroy/damage your property while lien is held on it.
THAT'S NOT FUNNY!!!
Cheers,
prat
"Never been a fan of slap stick?"
It hurts more when it's real...
lawyerliz,
Wile E. Coyote is the same joke...over and over...and it's funny every time.
The Three Stoodges is great too...but only with Curly...Nya Nya Nya...I don't like Shemp.
Cheers,
The trash out refi is just another embedded option that wasn't properly modeled.
Allen C,
""Never been a fan of slap stick?"
It hurts more when it's real..."
ROFLMAO,
Cheers,
"I have never got the 3 Stooges tho I think the Whos on First think is probably not slapstick and funny if you like that kind of thing."
Who's On First was Abbott and Costello.
Now, S N up there at 10:19 is pretty funny. Borat does economics?
Borat misses the part where a heavy armor column is needed to enter some of these neighborhoods. Maybe we can outsource the filming to Chechnya vets.
laweyliz,
For you, my dear,
YouTube - Who's on first?
Cheers,
Larry of The Three Stooges actually developed a callous on the left side of his face from being slapped by Moe so many times.
Prat,
Beliefs are free of charge...unless you are Christian, then it's 10% of net.
bs
Well, I had an assignment on a repo in a gated community last year. When I first drove up, I thought nice house. But it was completely gutted on the inside. I mean, everything was taken, carpet, doors, lights, cabinets, appliances, vanities, toilets; the sheetrock was ripped out and the plumbing and wiring stolen. It cost over $35,000 in repairs just to get this house into marketable condition.
But then I reasoned, what did anyone expect to happen in this environment? The lender says, no credit, no documentation, no down payment, hey, no problem! You can get a 100% LTV, roll over the closing costs, and move into this gorgeous house in a gated community for nothing. Then the appliance store says, no credit, no documentation, no down payment, hey, no problem! You don't even have to pay interest for the first year. You can have all the appliances for your new home for nothing. Then the furniture store says, no credit, no documentation, no down payment, hey, no problem. You don't even have to pay interest for the first year. You can have all this furniture for your new home for nothing.
All this for a house 10 miles from the Mexican border.
Now, is it a stretch of the imagination to see that this environment creates the perfect opportunity for someone to completely rennovate his house in Reynosa? I mean, take out the loan, buy and furnish the house, live in it for, what, a few weeks, then gut it, load up a truck, and head south.
Do I have any sympathy for these people? No, they're thieves. Do I have any sympathy for the lender, the appliance store or the furniture store? No, they're fools.
Now, that's a far cry from someone who was conned into taking out a loan he couldn't afford only to lose his house to foreclosure. Do I understand why he would trash the house before he was evicted? Yes. Do I condone it? No, not in the least. Do I have any sympathy for him? No, and the reason why is very simple. Because I've been conned more than once in my life, and no one ever had any sympathy for me.
I don't do politics, mainly because I got out of junior high in 1974. I believe in free people, free markets and free enterprise. But one cannot have free people without the rule of law. Nor can one have free markets without regulation or free enterprise without accountability.
What I have witnessed over the last decade or two is a complete disregard for the rule of law (illegal immigration, not to mention predatory lending), a total disintegration of regulation (shadow banking system) and an absolute dissolution of accountability (bailouts by the Fed). Some might refer to this as the Brave New World. I refer to it as Hell.
When asked what kind of government the Framers had given us, Ben Franklin famously said, "A republic, if you can keep it." Well, from what I've seen recently, we're doing a pretty damn good job of losing it.
Is that a joke? No, and I'm not laughing.
Didn't White write the Once and Future King? And so was capable of style and verve.
Strunk and White doesn't even follow Strunk and White, as no competent writers would. Us professional linguists generally just ignore self-appointed language mavens, but the <a href=""http://www.languagelog.com">LanguageLog folks have tracked down a lot of S & W's inconsistencies.
I'll never get why people think that just because someone uses language, they're necessarily experts in how it works. We don't have people writing newspaper columns on biology just because they have lots of kids, or about the economy just because they're rich. Oh, wait...
The 3 Stooges are a guy thing.
Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck...
...why, I ought'ta...
...Moe! Larry! Cheese! Moe! Larry! Cheese!...
...no, the Camembert!...
That's funny stuff.
P.S: Misean, I love Curly and Shemp. Joe and Curly Joe were just sad.
"but it's limited entertainment because we are often dealing with heads over which such a response tends to fly at a fairly high altitude."
The most masterful use of words I've seen in a long time! BRAVO!!
One of these days I am going to figure out the psychology of people who insist on telling me that I used too many words to make a point that could have been made in two sentences/paragraphs. I haven't yet done so, but given that I seem doomed to endless exposure to this type, some day I will.
What is it with you philistines? I understand that you are philistines--you have no conception of reading and writing as anything other than strictly "efficient" information transfers, the linquistic equivalent of changing a twenty at the teller window--but I don't know why, as philistines, you keep exposing yourself to a writer whom you have to have learned by now doesn't play by your rules. Or why, having supposedly read all the way to the bottom, you keep trying to reform me. Have you never noticed that it doesn't work? Have you never run into that definition of repeating a failed strategy over and over again, the one with "insanity" in it?
I am not planning on reforming any time soon. I am here to amuse those in our readership who enjoy playing with words. Who rather like an oblique approach that opens up--rather than "foreclosing"--thought. Who do not want the executive summary, do not want the bullet points, do not want the cross-stitch sampler version.
The rest of you are free to be here--we don't card at the door--but you should have enough basic social skills to figure out that you aren't the one this piece was written for.
It's a big internet. Go read Instapundit if you want to be told what you think in as few words as possible. If you want to be adventurous and see what all the fuss is about on the other side, you do have to actually try the dishes on the buffet table. It does you no good to look 'em over once and then demand a bowl of tomato soup.
Now, is it a stretch of the imagination to see that this environment creates the perfect opportunity for someone to completely rennovate his house in Reynosa?
Humorless and racist.
Ok, then I don't like anything about the Stooges.
Lawyerliz eats humble pie.
I guess I used to like Abbott and Costello occasionally when I watched it as a kid in the 50s.
I really like the Marx brothers thing where they stuff a bizillion people in a stateroom (OT of course).
Marcus,
Shemp had his moments. But Curly is Glod. Joe and Curly Joe...that's like saying Temple of Doom was an Indiana Jones movie.
Cheers,
I would love to be alone in a room with the guy from Washington Mutual that dreamed up the scheme to keep billing my memory impaired mother for a flood insurance policy at 2x the cost of her policy already in force. This happened every year despite terse letters from me telling them to cut the crap. Bullshit like that is not accidental, and I would happily rip out all the wiring from his house right now.
Tanta,
Not to be a tpyo fnatic, but,
"Go read Instapundit if you want to be told what you think in as few words as possible."
The "you" before think is misspelled. I believe it is "to".
Cheers,
Ok, I think I can be funny. People have laughed at my witticisms at parties. (You'll have to take my word for it.) Please explain to me the cheese joke.
Is it that one of them doesn't know the names of cheeses? As in Camenbert? Is that funny? Is there something else to it? I think this sailed 'way far UNDER me.
Really? Not even karmic prophylactic sympathy? Not even like, it's in my own self interest to cut a little slack to someone who misjudged his own margin of error in case I ever misjudge my own? Your reach never exceeded your grasp on anything? What a dour world you must inhabit.
Damn, I nearly missed that one. May I steal "karmic prophylactic sympathy" some day? It's wonderful.
I don't know if this is a profoundly new view, or not, but the question of a bailout (in any of its forms) misses the point that we are 7-8 years into a string of bailouts. I got to go out, but at least since the dot.com implosion, there has been successive bailouts: 9-11, airlines, auto, ailines, again, housing, autos, housing again etc...
I've met a few of them, and I can tell you homeowners in general are a very nasty lot.
No, Misean, I did mean that one.
When I want your opinion, I'll tell you what it is. Was the phrase lurking in context there.
lawyerliz,
Cheeze is funny:
YouTube - The Cheese Shop sketch, Monty Python
Those that claim to have no sympathy for people being foreclosed on are, at best, pretending to sociopathy. A lot of them, I think, can't distinguish between having sympathy for someone and thinking that they need to be bailed out. For most of these people, I have a great deal of sympathy, but also think that the best way forward is to have the foreclosure proceed and for everyone to get on with their lives. However, I do think that it's a good idea for the rest of us to provide ways to help them move forward.
There are another set of people who claim to have no sympathy who seem to think that they will never make a catastrophic mistake. Therefore, they have nothing but ridicule for those who do make such errors. This is a set of people who I can't really fathom. I feel sorry for them, actually, and when some of them make catastrophic mistakes of their own, I will feel sympathy. I still reserve the right to tell them that the best way forward is for them to suck it up and move on. Maybe not, though.
There is a third set who not only can't see themselves making a catastrophic mistake, but don't really believe that anyone else will, either. Therefore, they ascribe all behavior that might be interpreted as a catastrophic mistake to malice. No one made an honest mistake in taking on a mortgage that they couldn't afford; they were just trying out a get rich quick scheme. My inclination is to think that these people are projecting, and that they would be more than happy to take advantage of a get rich scheme at someone else's expense if only they can convince themselves that it has no downside.
I just finished rereading the op, and there is one type of humor that isnt accounted for- the cop/emergency room/crisis response kind. There are times when you cant look away, you cant ignore whats in front of you, and you cant run from the room screaming. The only option is make jokes, usually at the expense of the parties to the incident.
The more I look at the fallout from subprime, the more I think the jokes are headed in this direction.
Is it fair? No, but hurt feelings are going to have to be put aside for now.
lawyerliz:
Curly goes crazy and can only be calmed by the smell and taste of cheese. Moe explains that Curly reacts to cheese this way because his mother was scared by a rat.
When Moe and/or Larry come to his aid and offer him cheese, Curly smells it and says, "No, Camembert!" (in different episodes, it's different kinds of cheese - Limburger, etc.)
Guess you had to be there.
And a guy.
Tanta,
What about my sq. ft analogy? Huh? You can use that. It was witty. I know it was cause, well, it just was.
Some Sunday reflection...Many of us here gathered calling BS to the nonsense around us and quietly cheering with every revelation.
Now that most see the bubble, we're looking to see how bad it will get. It seems many are in the disillusion stage and many want to avoid the panic stage which seems inevitable.
Perhaps a year from now, we'll see real pain all around as we debate whether we're in a depression. Our monitoring and positioning for the bubble burst will turn to looking for signs of anything positive.
We live in a selfish society, where everybody only cares about number one. The bankers have prayed on the more vulnerable and less intelligent classes to make large salaries and bonuses. (Still that does not excuse the wanton destruction of property, which in the end, is owned by somebody.) The whole system needs to be thoroughly cleaned up.
Perhaps a year from now, we'll see real pain all around as we debate whether we're in a depression. Our monitoring and positioning for the bubble burst will turn to looking for signs of anything positive.
By then we will all be in the litterbox.
Ok, I go now. Off on my wafe of caffiene
Tanta --
I don't know why, as philistines, you keep exposing yourself to a writer whom you have to have learned by now doesn't play by your rules.
Oh, that's easy; some of us value not your words, but the ideas and expertise behind them. We would prefer to spend less time getting at those ideas and that expertise, but of course you are free to write however you please. (Just as we are free to complain about it.)
I am here to amuse those in our readership who enjoy playing with words. Who rather like an oblique approach that opens up--rather than "foreclosing"--thought.
Very well. But could you do a small favor for a poor philistine? Try to be careful that your wordiness does not merely become an excuse for responding to any criticism with, "Shorter [xxx]: You need to take out all of the parts of the post that aren't validating my point of view. It would make more sense to me that way." Such dodging of criticism makes your "baroque" style look less like art and more like an attempt to disguise fuzzy thinking.
Really? Not even karmic prophylactic sympathy?
Yawn. I made it perfectly clear, repeatedly, what I meant by having no sympathy: No bail-out, thanks.
Of course my own reach has exceeded my grasp, and it will again, but I will never ask (much less demand) that somebody else bear the cost. I pay for my mistakes; I do not even argue over speeding tickets. In my world, we all take full responsibility for our own choices. And it is not a dour place at all; quite the opposite, in fact.
Some truths really are simple, and sometimes brevity really is the soul of wit.
NO BAIL OUT.
NO BAIL OUT.
NO BAIL OUT.
I have sympathy for bad journalists. Heck, I even have sympathy for whiny bloggers who love to complain about bad journalists. Do you think they ever considered doing something about it, like, I dunno, maybe becoming a journalist for a mainstream publication? But that would be too hard, it is much more fun to whine about it.
For the record my frequent and public pronouncements of having no sympathy whatsoever are nothing but a dumbed down oversimplification because explaining the complexities of why actions need consequences for the ultimate good of those in trouble merely confuses and stirs up the rabble.
some of us value not your words, but the ideas and expertise behind them. We would prefer to spend less time getting at those ideas and that expertise
But there's no free lunch, Nemo. There's no get-expertise-quick scheme around here. You gotta work for it, you gotta earn it, and you don't get bailed out if you blow it.
Besides, I am not an "expertise mine" that you can decide to exploit more efficiently. I've never even had someone who was paying my salary say such a thing to me. Seriously.
Can I just say... Thanks baby boomers?
You all took a wonderful country and royally screwed it up. You are all full of doo-doo and willingly gave up the rights of future generations so you could live in your happy utopia of blue ED pills, boats, SUVs, and second and third homes. But now that all of your boats, SUVs, second and third homes are starting to look like poor investments, you will pawn off the tab to your sons, daughters, and grandchildren. A true testament to those who saw the BS upclose... after all I suppose you are the people who ushered in the era of a "no fault divorce". Even in this time, I'm sure you'll end up electing another boomer to run the country, in-spite of the failures of the last two boomer presidents. You are truly a generation of people who have "manned up" and taken responsibility for your government and their actions.
I'm sorry, but I just can't take this anymore, because whenever I look at "who" is leading "everything" in our "country" it's always some darn awful boomer. I'm sorry but most of you are stuck in a Cold War mind-set... I'd really like someone to show me otherwise... but your policies are killing the younger generations. From health care costs, to college costs, to energy costs, to housing costs.
"Karmic Prophylactic Sympathy" was on the second Jefferson Airplane album.
Tanta writes:
But there's no free lunch, Nemo.
TANSTAAFL. Now that definitely violates the nutshell rule of words to live by.
The smart patrol
Nowhere to go
Suburban robots who monitor reality
Common stock
We work around the clock
We shove the poles in the holes
Tanta sounds like my dear dparted granny if she, my granny, had had a PHD in Finance. No BS, call'm as you see them, if you don't like it take a hike. Great fun!
this probably would have been a good post to try out the new auto-response buttons before the comments.
El Cliffo, you are fabulous.
A farmer reports on his blog that the suprim, motgat metdown, is efeckting his grain markiting plan.
Incoming
That's contanement.
NO BAIL OUT.
NO BAIL OUT.
NO BAIL OUT.
You are winning no hearts and minds to your cause. You just aren't. I take seriously your right to your cause. I am giving you some advice.
Repeating yourself with the volume turned up to 11 is not a species of using persuasive language or engaging in honest debate with someone else. It is, well, having a tantrum.
Since it's literary Sunday, I will also point out that using caps or boldface or exclamation points or all of the above does not increase the truth-value or utility of a statement. These things merely call attention to a statement. Rather desperately, in many cases.
RED IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY!
Tanta, I reserve my right to have a tantrum, if I wish!!!!!!!!
ac,
"I've met a few of them, and I can tell you homeowners in general are a very nasty lot."
Coffee everywhere.
Side hurts, can't stop laughing.
Cheers,
Foreclosed tenent simply refers to a person who is foreclosed upon and is living in the house. If you don't "get it", then do some research - if would have taken you less time than writing a rambling entry that added nothing to the blogsphere.
Tanta,
"No, Misean, I did mean that one.
When I want your opinion, I'll tell you what it is. Was the phrase lurking in context there."
Right after ac, STOP! I'm dying here!.
ROFL....
Cheers,
Tanta,
Strunk & White is of no help. Even Arthur Plotnik appears unwilling to broach the subject. What are the rules for "I told you so?"
Anthony, I reserve my right to assume that your reasons for your belief are as childish as your delivery.
There is waaay too much emotion invested by the anti-bailout crowd. They can no longer read any post, on any subject, without launching into it. You can even write a post begging people to stop being so self-involved, and they just fire back with IT DOES TOO MATTER HOW I FEEL ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE!
I therefore suggest not having a tantrum, even if you're tempted.
OT:
Why California Isn't Buying Warren Buffett's Bond Insurance
Why California Isn't Buying Warren Buffett's Bond Insurance - CNBC
California's Treasurer Bill Lockyer sees it differently. He sees decades of history in which almost no muni bonds have fallen victim to a default. (MBIA and Ambac got in trouble not because they guaranteed munis, but because they branched into riskier areas, backing bundles of other loans, including those notorious sub-primes.)
Lockyer argues that the main reason muni bond buyers think insurance is needed at all in most cases is because the big credit ratings agencies don't evaluate state and local government debt the same way as corporate debt, artificially lowering credit ratings for those governments.
again,
I'll echo that others seem to feel as I do, although they word it differently.
to be concise (since above I rambled over several posts)
-many of us have empathy but not necessarily sympathy
-the goal IMO is to separate having empathy with that of fiduciary responsibility to the involved parties
-and too many people confuse the above two very separate ideas.
you can:
-have empathy and want a bailout
-have empathy but oppose a bailout
-have no empathy and want a bailout
-have no empathy and oppose a bailout.
but it gets lost, especially when people simply scream "NO BAIL OUT"
and it is also lost as those like me (with empathy but opposed to a bailout) get angry when we see the bailout comin'
reminds me of my crystal meth brother. I have empathy and sympathy for him. Am I going to bail him out of jail again, or give him money? hell no. been there, done that. Doesn't mean I hate him, but I sure hate what he's done to our family. and sometimes it's hard to separate out that hurt.
and I'm not sure I want to give any more of my money to the finance/homeowner addicts either.
Tanta, maybe the whole country will be having a tantrum before too long, and I'm just one of millions.
Re: Tanta, I liked the point you made, but you could have done it in 2 paragraphs instead of 200. This post was way too rambling.
Shut up Jake!
Tanta --
Besides, I am not an "expertise mine" that you can decide to exploit more efficiently. I've never even had someone who was paying my salary say such a thing to me. Seriously.
Point taken. I apologize, and today is the last day you will find me complaining about your writing style.
That said, in my experience, "oblique" writing is often precisely an attempt to "foreclose" -- rather than open up -- thought and debate. Just something to consider.
"When you fight with monsters, take care lest you become a monster; and when you stare into an abysss, the abyss also stares into you."
Have a great day, all. I am off to enjoy the sunshine.
Foreclosed tenent simply refers to a person who is foreclosed upon and is living in the house.
Really? So the third sentence of Megan's little post doesn't imply she's talking specifically about people who can't make their mortgage payments?
Perhaps it would help to get all legalistic and persnicketty and point out that loans are foreclosed. Not people, not houses.
Otherwise I should have written a post that observed how difficult it often is to tell the difference between a joke and a stupid. My bad.
Nemo,
Nix on comments, knock it off
Tanta, maybe the whole country will be having a tantrum before too long, and I'm just one of millions.
Maybe they just did.
Maybe the whole boom was fueled by a kind of tantrum about getting one before they're out of reach. Getting one NOW, not later.
Maybe another tantrum doesn't sound promising.
Maybe now might be a good time to . . . fail to oversimplify?
I HAVE A RIGHT TO HAVE A TANTRUM!!!!!!!!!!
I WANT MY RIGHT TO HAVE A TANTRUM!!!!
I CAN HAZ BAILZOUT NOW? PLEEZE!
Cheers,
Given that we're already bailing out Wall Street, specifically including Bear shareholders, through the Fed with the public blessing of the Ownership Society Administration, shouldn't the tantrums read NO MORE BAILOUTS rather than NO BAILOUTS?
Excellent and enjoyable post Tanta. Your comments were also good - I particularly liked you have no conception of reading and writing as anything other than strictly "efficient" information transfers, the linquistic equivalent of changing a twenty at the teller window - I plead guilty to that of course but I claim my saving grace has always been the ability to laugh at myself.
There were many gems in your post. Wonderful.
Regarding the subject at hand - sympathy and empathy I have aplenty - for all parties, lenders too at that - you can't have spent 50 years on this planet and not become aware of the insanities and absurdities that abound - but, OT ( since the main post was not about this aspect and I explicitly acknowledge that but its an aspect I focus on( yeah I know what that makes me )), when it comes to money there is zero chance that I'll dip into my pocket voluntarily, at this stage of the game, and will work hard to escape the clutches of silent pickpockets (i.e. the Fed and their trashing of the US$) and other assorted thieves who want to dip and ARE DIPPING into my pocket.
They can call on me when we get to the havela, shanty town or Mumbai slum, (Hooverville 2010 style?) level but not till then.
-K
OT: Misrepresentation. A representation (other than a representation under Section 3(e) or (f)) made or repeated or deemed to have been made or repeated by the party or any Credit Support Provider of such party in this Agreement or any Credit Support Document proves to have been incorrect or misleading in any material respect when made or repeated or deemed to have been made or repeated;
One of us is never going to be happy here, and I think it should be you.
May I borrow that phrase for my next internet debate? I promise to be careful with it. You could poke an eye out with that one.
YLSP writes:
Can I just say... Thanks baby boomers?
You aren't supposed to point out that the king wears no pants....
(but I agree with you 92.7%)
Hey Tanta, new GM article to dissect.
Or maybe agree with. Part of her point seems to be that those capitalizing on the foreclosure boom are doing shoddy work. Imagine the shock!
Tanta, No more bailouts, true. I get your point there. I don't think the general population yet understands what is happening, or indeed the implications of bailouts. The MSM in general lets people believe bailouts are the saviors of the economy, when in fact they are aimed at saving the bankers and their jobs. Will there come a time when people realize this?
Can we please get off this topic and back to Paulson's "plan" to seal cash from The Treasury?
Tanta,
"Perhaps it would help to get all legalistic and persnicketty and point out that loans are foreclosed."
Listen here, I'm a piece of paper with a punch of ink all over me. However, I find myself important. When others say they are ruptured by the inability of parties to live up to the meaning of the ink all over me, I take offence. My understanding is that when you monkeys splashed all that ink on me, and scribbled your name on the bottom, my understanding was that I (since I is already capitalized, I cannot use caps to emphasize I) was the ruptured party. With all these rupturings going 'round now, I feel quite slighted, as well as having a severe headache. All you scribbling monkeys can go stuff yourselves. I'm outa here.
Cheers,
YLSP:
As Billy Joel put it, "We didn't start the fire."
Greenspan is not a baby boomer, kthxbai.
There is no fire like passion
There is no shark like hatred
There is no snare like folly
There is no torrent like greed
Since it's such a rambling blog with many subtleties, I'll respond in kind.
Tanta said: "...It has, actually, been hard for me to "get" why some people think that the first question to be established in any discussion of the real world is whether their own personal sympathies are engaged or not..."
That's a completely normal place to start, as long as it doesn't end there. I just take issue with people who don't get past that point and extrapolate out the misery of a few as the misery of the many.
The same "corrupt" system that is "screwing" other of my fellow citizens is profiting me, and not at their expense. Also, in many ways the homeowners being "bailed-out" will ultimately be worse-off than me, who needs no bailout even though I took the same risk as they did, taking out a mortgage and buying a house.
Tanta also made the comment that (paraphrased) "we are interpreting reality instead of recording it like a good camera."
I like that phrase a lot, and "recording it like a good camera" is what I try to do when I look at housing, the economy or the stock market. While I may personally sympathize (or not) with homeowners running into trouble, that's not a factor when I'm trying to figure out what I should be doing about it (selling my house and renting, shorting homebuilder stocks, whatever).
Finally, as to what constitutes humor,
on the right-hand side of the CR site, I'm looking at these ads:
"Virgin Money Loans
Protect your relationships and money when using private loans."
"We Do The Impossible
Commercial Mortgage Lender Funding Loans Since 1990"
"Church Loans & Investment
Traditional Lending to Churches Since 1959 for Building & Refinance"
"Fed Cuts Rates 1/2 Point
Free & Easy Mortgage Calculator. Check Payments & Rates at Move.com"
"JLS Loans and Realty
Helping your dreamd come true Residential-Investment-Commercial"
...on a bearish housing blog that regularly bemoans the real-estate bubble and over-indebtedness of the American people.
Not sure if this is funny or as criminal as the very contradictions of the High, the Mighty and the New York Times that Tanta so much loves to tee-off on.
Sebastia
I just finished rereading the op, and there is one type of humor that isnt accounted for- the cop/emergency room/crisis response kind.
I think a humor theorist--there are them--would say that this kind of humor is actually the opposite of the kind I identify in the post. It isn't "subversive," it's "repressive." It attempts to make certain facts easier to "deal with," rather than making certain kinds of sanctimony harder to maintain. On the one hand it's kind of a natural human reaction to horror: deflect, deflect, deflect. On the other hand, it's the same impulse that makes the bully operate: ridicule a person in public, and the person therefore loses his essential humanity and becomes a "butt" we can all proceed to have no sympathy for without feeling uncomfortable about it.
I surely agree that it will get harder and harder to tell the difference as this thing unwinds.
Good morning,
120 people in their preferred place of worship here this am.
Couple of items --
T.H. White not William White wrote
Once and Future King if memory serves
Elements of Style was primarily for
mass media, advertising, public relations practioners to communicate to the broadest range of literate readers more effectively and is still useful to bloggers even if more widely ignored than ever.
S N posted a couple of times about damage to properties by "foreclosed tenants" -- perhaps examine the psychology more closely S N, not just the legality.
At the time the foreclosure has actually happened, say Day 1, which terminates the mortgage and the note obligations for BOTH parties, on Day Two the former borrowers if still in possession of the premises are no longer legally bound to such promised good behavior. Judicial opinions may differ but that is way after the fact.
If the new foreclosed tenants are pissed, they might act it out.
Legal consequences will be last thing on their minds "getting even" is first. Childish, I know, and of no long term benefit to them just some short term knowing they didn't take dispossession entirely bending over.
Even if it was all their fault to start with.
BTW, there are hard ass lender's representatives, aka repo specialists, say, who do their damndest to be turned in "victims" of such short fuse people.
Gawain's Ghost is obviously an appraiser, as am I; be one in any US metro area through up and down markets for 20+ years and you will have "seen most of it, but not all".
The scenario of buying a house in way south CA just to strip it out to furnish a house in Mexico is not implausable and is not racist either.
This would be a crime of opportunity with the opportunists taking full advantage of those lenders and merchants who literally begged for it in broadcast advertising.
now back to my regularly scheduled Roadrunner and Opus cartoons
"today is the last day you will find me complaining about your writing style."
Perhaps now you can clue the others in as well? Simply because we can't see you or it's more difficult to throw you out doesn't impart any justification for your disrespect.
Re: Actually I have this terrible habit of curling my right hand into a fist and literally banging on the "enter" key (the one on the far right, on the number pad).
Tanta, you may have:
Carpal tunnel syndrome
Carpal tunnel syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Repetitive activities are often blamed for the development of CTS along with several other possible causes
Sebastian, I do not believe that anyone is a "good camera." Not you. Not me. Not Jas.
We are all interpreting. Our only hope is to make clear the assumptions we bring to that activity and to take into account the fact that we choose what to look at--and others might choose differently and get different results.
This is an issue that philosophers of the west and the east and the south and the north have been kicking around since, oh, antiquity. I am never going to claim I've solved the problem--that would be fearful hubris--but I am going to claim that the term "sophomoric" is something you don't want to earn. A lot of the reason you get beaten up pretty severely by other commenters here is that you do have a tendency to suggest that you're the only one who can "see things as they are."
Well, you and Jas.
Seb,
Well I disagree with everything above this, this was just ROLF:
""Virgin Money Loans
Protect your relationships and money when using private loans.""
Do I get a prophylactic when I sign?
Priceless.
Cheers,
Megan McArdle is a good camera if you enjoy seeing only the far right side of an image.
It attempts to make certain facts easier to "deal with," rather than making certain kinds of sanctimony harder to maintain.
I think I agree, but I may change my mind later.
The difference may be whether you are an outsider looking in, or an insider looking for a way out.
Can we get back on topic:
Re: legislative declarations of emergency are "conclusive" unless "obviously false and a palpable attempt at dissimulation."[24] There have been some vigorous judicial dissents to such deference, the most notable in an amusing case in which a city declared an emergency need for a new sports stadium...
See Bear Stearns bailout Pla
Tanta,
"the term "sophomoric" is something you don't want to earn."
Everyone earns it in college. If one didn't it wouldn't be a term. Nor would it be the price of admission.
AND GLOD AMMIT!!!!
I HAVE A RIGHT TO BE SOPHMORIC!!!&!&*&#@@&
Cheers,
Anonymous writes:
no, the joke's on me, who tried to buy a house in 05 and thought the things were just cwazee and decided to wait it out... looks like the bailout's not for me.
Anonymous | 03.30.08 - 11:16 am
No, joke is on me. I succeeded in buying in 2005, using fixed rate financing that I can afford, but totally oblivious to how far out of reality RE prices were. Now similar houses down the street list for 12% less and nobody even comes to look. Since I can actually make my payments, no bailout for me.
Lucky for me, I have a sense of humor. And a steady job
.
(In retrospect, I'd have been pretty far ahead had I not succeeded and kept renting.)
Nor would it be the price of admission.
"worth" should be in there somewhere.
Sorry,
Cheers,
I'm sorry, but I just can't take this anymore, because whenever I look at "who" is leading "everything" in our "country" it's always some darn awful boomer. .... your policies are killing the younger generations. From health care costs, to college costs, to energy costs, to housing costs.
YLSP | 03.30.08 - 12:52 pm | #
Word.
Chris Bowers has referred to it as a "generational failure."
The boomer generation's version of the Apollo project is....the Iraq war.
I have never felt bound by dead 19th century grammarians, codified by dead 20th century fascist engrish teachers.
If Shake speare could modify 'cording to his wonts, why can't I?
As for the topic of M.McA. She is a definite glibertarian, who benefited from a stretch at the Economist, but didn't quite take it all to heart.
Well, as for the tear out therapy, folks can't afford those high priced psychofolks who justify all their failures. Instead, they rip out the plumbing and wiring and use the proceeds to pay for the beer to keep the party going.
As for the property right respecting upright folks here- whats in your family tree? Got any cousins in the crow bar motel? If not, then did you just liquidate them, or just disown them?
Geez, my b-i-l needs some of that sympathy along with a check as his business turtles, told him that it was coming, but did he listen?
Heck no. So now you can either help or let him sink faster, or slow enough to maybe salvage his primary house.
Bah. Easy enough to tell folks what to do, hard enough to get them to do even half of your prescription.
Life in a community requires sacrifice by all the community members, otherwise we could all just go back to the cavemen days. GO TANTA GO!!!
Someday this war's gonna end...
I get the trash out as a means to get some back. It falls into the category of keying a car in retaliation. But is anyone else worried about how far the undercurrent of anger might grow? The rioting that followed the Rodney King trial didn't rise out of a social vacuum. Real anger was involved. Just seems like a huge mistake to ignore the new anger.
Trash outs feel a little like the tip of an iceberg.
Everyone earns it in college.
Everyone (is supposed to) leave it behind in college. Sebastian's posts tend to imply that he's older than I am.
The classic "sophomoric" essay (not to be confused with a plain old sophomore essay) begins: "Since the dawn of time, human beings have ______."
They're most amusing when the blank is filled in with something of obvious recent historical vintage, like "relied on financial advisors" or what have you. But the real failing--aside from just using a cliche--is that only the sophomoric begin an argument by declaring that whatever it's going to be about is an unarguable fact of an immutable human nature that has never changed and never will.
That's "foreclosing" thought.
Tanta said: "A lot of the reason you get beaten up pretty severely by other commenters here is that you do have a tendency to suggest that you're the only one who can "see things as they are."..."
Granted, and I should correct that.
It's not that I'm the only one who can see things as they are, because many can.
If there's anything positive I bring to this party, it's that I have the capability of comparing current conditions with previous times when conditions were similar, from which I can draw reasonable conclusions as to what's likely to happen next.
And perhaps I should be more circumspect on other issues outside of that specialty.
Sebastia
mcmegan one of the most intentionally stupid glibertarians writing today. To add to that sadness, she's young enough to pollute future generations with her offal rather than, if she were older, being able to look forward to her retirement.
"Jas Jain writes:
Showing your true colors, Tanta?"
I like Jas' color. It's officially known as Black Hole. Absolutely nothing can escape it. It even scares away heavy metal bands (Spinal Tap included).
I don't get this, is this a joke?
But I wanted apony.
Maybe the whole boom was fueled by a kind of tantrum about getting one before they're out of reach. Getting one NOW, not later.
No, the boom in house prices was likely due more to the -
Dot com bust, resulting in a desire for a more stable investment
Falling interest rates, resulting in rising prices for existing homes
Changes in the mortgage industry, originating mortgages for sale
Maybe baby boomer demographics, able to afford to spend more
All coincided to drives prices up.
Tanta said: "...Sebastian's posts tend to imply that he's older than I am...."
"Don't ask, don't tell.":)
S.
Tanta, do you get a kick out of "calling out" another blog?
Sometimes your posts rub me the wrong way, like a snob that loves to boast of his/her intellectual superiority.
"Since the dawn of time, human beings have ______."
It was a dark and stormy night...
I'm no big fan of a(nother) bailout
myself. However, I'd love nothing more than to see a little across-the-board enforcement of the game rules already on the books.
How's ACME's stock been doing since Wile E. has been retired?
NO BAILOUT!
No bailout!
Except FDIC insurance. Don't want to return that excess savings. (Waving the flag)
And, and...
Social Security! Don't want to be forced to support my in-laws who didn't save anything. (Waving flag more vigourously)
And, Medicare! I don't want my parents (who ate trans-fats) to die an ugly, pointless death. (Waving two flags)
And....
The Federal Reserve! Keep subsidizing banks so there is somebody crazy enough to keep loaning money in case I need to sell my house, or write a check, or get paid. (cue patriotic music)
If we are going to screw somebody, it better darn well be the gold bugs and the gun nuts. Because, darn'it, they just shouldn't be right.
I think I agree, but I may change my mind later.
The difference may be whether you are an outsider looking in, or an insider looking for a way out.
I am always inclined to think that reserving your right to re-think something is a wise approach.
I once responded to a suggestion from the surgical oncologist who had only recently removed 48 centimeters of my intestinal tract that "you've got more guts than I do." That might have elicited a grin, but it also wiped one off some's face, as it were.
Hostility or good humor? Who knows? The fact that I was still attached to a morphine pump might have had something to do with it, but I suspect I'd have said it drug-free if it had occurred to me quickly enough.
Some things are just so ambiguous that you can't ever "decide" them.
Cash-strapped Clinton fails to pay bills
Cash-strapped Clinton fails to pay bills - Kenneth P. Vogel - POLITICO.com
Maybe she can get a refi at taxpayer expense.
Acme was bought and broken up in a hostile takeover. All that was left was the mortgage division. It blew up.
I bought a home,
I am not a gnome
What givest me pleasure,
I have little known
Why my only treasure
Is this lonely bone
Having asked the teller
Is this what I bought
She points to the seller
You! Give it a thought
I bought a house
I am not a louse
Cheers,
Sometimes your posts rub me the wrong way, like a snob that loves to boast of his/her intellectual superiority.
Opinion noted. I will take it under advisement.
Especially since tweaking someone who blogs under a fancy magazine's masthead is so . . . irresistable.
DEFLATION---HOWSWEETITIS said (of Tanta): "Sometimes your posts rub me the wrong way, like a snob that loves to boast of his/her intellectual superiority."
Don't confuse Tanta with me or Jas Jain. She's not just boasting.
S.
Tanta wrote, "Sometimes the joke actually arises when we find the naive or uninformed or logic-impaired coming up with an inspired phrase like "foreclosed tenants.".
I'm sure blog writers love to be called "logic-impaired".
I see no reason to use these choice words.
Why not say you choose to disagree and give the reasons why? Not sure why there is a need to use the words naive,uninformed or logic-impaired, even if that may be true.
Although most of the regular readers of this blog are probably like me people who long believed that the upward trend of home prices was unsustainable and would end, and we have been proven right, we must never forget that even at the peak of the boom some of the most famous economists in the world -- including Ben Bernanke -- were opining that the worst that could happen would be that prices would plateau for a while.
Five years ago my daughter and her husband, viewing the relentless rise in prices and wanting a home they could modify to their tastes, started shopping for a house. I strongly advised them to wait, because prices would fall. Other factors came into play to cause them to wait two years, during which prices continued to soar and the buying power of of their substantial down-payment savings suffered relentless erosion -- and the economist comments and "expert" quotes continued the drumbeat of "prices will never fall".
So three years ago they bought -- shopping carefully, with a big down payment, and not completely rejecting my arguments and so at a price they could well afford.
One factor in their decision was a belief that if housing prices started to fall very much, the Fed and Congress would organize a bailout -- and gee, it looks like that just might happen.
Personally, I continue to think that we are entering into a period like Japan's slump so well described by Richard Koo in "Balance Sheet Recession" -- a period in which everyone is concentrating on balance sheet repair, paying down debt and rebuilding savings -- such that any attempt to blow a new bubble will be futile.
But I could be wrong. It may be that for most of the people who bought in the bubble years, that was the right decision -- that most of them will be bailed out, home prices will resume their relentless rise, and people like me who sold with the intent to buy again when prices fall are just suckers.
If so, then the people who are getting foreclosed upon during this transient period before the bailout kicks in are quite justified in feeling they've been had. Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and all the other experts assured them that buying was the right decision, that prices would never fall. And they are just in the unlucky minority that's not going to get bailed out.
Seb,
Politely:
"If there's anything positive I bring to this party, it's that I have the capability of comparing current conditions with previous times when conditions were similar, from which I can draw reasonable conclusions as to what's likely to happen next."
You use the Wright Model BS Flying Pig, which is a yield curve model that does not even consider 3 Sigma events, let alone 6 Sigma events.
As I like to say, models work, until they don't.
Cheeers,
Jake writes:
Tanta, I liked the point you made, but you could have done it in 2 paragraphs instead of 200. This post was way too rambling.
Could have been 3 words instead of 25. Too rambling. Read your Strunk.
If we were all pragmatists we could agree that (a) foreclosed borrowers would feel the desire to trash said property (b) those who refused to participate in the buying binge would resent those who did and thereby aided in the bubble (c) that politicians would feel the need to provide a bailout, which I think is a certainty in a more expanded form next year and (d) that financial participants had sufficient incentives to create the bad loans that led to this crisis.
Personally, I've never understood the line of "two million homeowners that are at risk of losing their home." They will just go back to renting, which is what they should have been doing in the first place. Some of them are likely to be genuine victims of fraud, while some of them would have been gloating at those on the sidelines if their bet had turned out well.
"It even scares away heavy metal bands (Spinal Tap included)."
Nothing scares Spinal Tap. Their amps go to 11.
Cheers,
I have yet to see any substantial comment on the dynamics of pricing of new housing developments. I'll wager that the builders offered lower prices to those buying first (in "Phase 1") for a variety of reasons. As the development proceeds, "Phase 2" prices are set higher, for basically identical properties/houses. "Phase 3" are higher still. Now it doesn't take a genius to realize that if they buy at "full market value" in Phase 1, by the time Phase 2 is selling at higher prices, they buyers of Phase 1 have already made a profit (or built equity), since a completely comparable home has just sold at a higher price.
So, seeing how this happens, it would be perfectly rational to buy a house with no money down, knowing that equity would be built as soon as enough properties had sold. Heck, even buy another one on spec. I'm sure builder financing made it even easier than buy a house in the secondary market.
And, once this instant equity was acheived, refinancing out of short-term floating mortgages would be easy since the homeowner wouldn't be doing 100% financing.
The point it that there were a lot of reasons to buy homes with no money down. It does sound like a Ponzi scheme, since it is all predicated on having someone come around to take you out at a higher price. But that sounds like investing, in a way. There are numerous examples of hedge funds which put on trades and became "the market" for their positions. They failed spectacularly because they forgot, or misestimated, who was going to take them out of their positions at a higher price. Sometimes higher prices bring in more buyers, and sometimes they bring in more sellers.
In the housing market, clearly the rise in prices brought in more sellers (builders) and more buyers. The buyers were overwhelming the sellers. After a while, there was no one left to buy. And when that happens, there are only sellers left. And that's where we are today.
Anon,
No the Fed is opening the discount window to political campaigns next!
Wasn't it St. Peter who wrote that we are all tenants on the path to foreclosure? (1 Peter 2:11)
Schadenfreud increase as inequity, hardship and being cheated increases.
Sebastion
"It's not that I'm the only one who can see things as they are, because many can"
Is that the Catholics, Muslims, Jewish, Buddhist or maybe some other un-known fantasy group you belong to?
Misean said: "You use the Wright Model *************, which is a yield curve model that does not even consider 3 Sigma events, let alone 6 Sigma events...."
The yield-curve is one of the models that anticipates the conditions under which such events can or are likely to occur.
A model which uses high stock-market valuations and low earnings growth as inputs is another.
Do you honestly believe that recessions and stock market crashes are like a strike from a planet-killer asteroid, an event of total randomness over which there is no human control?
Doesn't CR's forecast of a housing "bubble" and "credit crunch" totally discredit your point of view, that such extreme events can't be foreseen?
Sebastian
Head of HUD Alphonse Jackson is on C-Span before the Hispanic realtors. Never seen him speak before, but anyone that can recognize a confidence man would have nothing to do with this fellow. "We saw this coming in 2005", ha-ha-ha. "$17b in FHASecure", a blatant falsehood. Wow. Sorry, don't believe anything said by a confidence man from Texas.
Tanta, superb post, thank you.
Yes, TH White wrote "The Once and Future King" but EB White wrote "Charlotte's Web" and re-edited "The Elements of Style"
Of them, Charlotte's Web is obviously the best.
I enjoyed JF Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales" when I was a pre-teen, which made all the more delicious when I read Mark Twain's devastating critique. Oddly enough, after I read the post and the comments, I perceived an inverse relationship, that is, those who are critiquing Tanta "style" are unintentionally humorous.
The main relationship I see in the length of this post is Tanta's need to vent her spleen, which the surgeon could have rectified by installing a spleen bypass valve while he was mucking about in there.
Do you honestly believe that recessions and stock market crashes are like a strike from a planet-killer asteroid, an event of total randomness over which there is no human control?
Human emotions are the causes, and no they didn't control any of it if they did they would never hapen right. One didn't need a model to see this train wreck coming back in 05 just good common sense was enough unless you were drinking the kool-aid.
Tanta:
Norman Mailer wrote a book "Why Are We in Vietnam?" where the action is on a bear hunt in Alaska.
Were a novel "Why are we in Iraq?" written I could see no better action then the trashing of a foreclosed house.
Cryptically yours
If Tanta's posts are really "too long," how come so many of us read them to the end, feel sad when they are over, and then cut to the comments in hopes she'll elaborate a little more and/or get off some nice little shots at her critics?
sdtfs | 03.30.08 - 2:45 pm
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses
"Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in "Deerslayer," and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record."
I apologise for straying off topic and probably feeding trolls, but the anti baby-boomer comments on this and other blogs are (I hope) worthy of comment. They sometimes seem to have the flavor of a more or less organized political move to decrease support for programs such as medicare and social security. Blaming boomers rather than republicans for Iraq is an interesting twist.
This may be too paranoid. It could just be the need to blame some group for what we fear is the destruction of our futures.
Can we get back to cheeze please?
I still don't see what's funny about the Stooges version, but the Monty Python skit was great. thanx for posting it.
I'm a boomer and I never did any of those things!
Tanta: on Trash-out deals - karma works in mysterious ways. One of the common ways that the banksterfraudsters would sell the "american dream of homeownership " to first time buyers was to portray the landlord as some absentee, pot-bellied, cigar-chomping evil-doer.
sdtfs,
Quite rightly so. . . and Twain could devastate just about any American foible he set his mind to. .
thanks
wow. Well Tanta, that was absolutely a great post. Incredibly great. hugely great. amazingly amazing (ly) great. So great in fact, that I read all the comments, something, I rarely do for any blogger even my favorites which, by the way, you are.
Okay, now, as someone who has no sense of humor (ask anyone) and is way too Sunday-school sympathetic to everyone, I have to say: the amount of serious, not quite with it, response to your post is absolutely amazing. In my learning about humor I come to understand that this is par for the course, which is funny, but really painful. Doh! Maybe that's why pain is funny -- all the humorless people who keep hurting themselves instead of getting the joke.
In more serious news: if you are going to be all straight and self righteous (ye commentersers ye) then the least you could do, it seems to this excessively serious person, is focus on the present and the future, not the past. I have bad news for you: the bailout? like um, she's already left port. Yup and took your taxes/bride with her.
So Tanta, I really do appreciate that your blog is non-political, even though, I myself, am extravagantly political. But I have to admit that I'm surprised that you chose to get political on some dumb writers essay, as opposed to the incredible, and (it's true) incredibly funny political machinations of our owners.
You see, all you serious ones, there is nothing quite as funny as a Republican president of the united states (who one assumes stands naked, though one shouldn't really assume much with this one) coming out and telling us that since we have a fiscal crisis it must be the institutions implemented in the New Deal that are to blame, and the obvious right thing to do is to 1) create a brand new federal system of regulation (golly I thought republicans wanted less new bureacracies not more, and gee, haven't we heard this song and dance before, but wait there's more), one in which 'all power will be centralized' (yeah baby centralize that evil gubmint), and in fact, now that you sort of well force us to think about these (ugh!) regulatory (holding nose) issues it seems pretty obvious that what we really ought to do (here it comes, bring it on home baby) is institutionalize (that is to say, formally, and legally make it the job of) the fed being in the business of (home run time) PROPPING UP MARKETS. Why, yes Batman, I do think, that is the proper role of goverment, and how very insightful, and generally leaderly of you, beloved hero to us all, to figure it out first.
The thing I don't 'get' about the 'sense of humor' crowd, is how come, they don't really notice when a 'sense of humor' is being used to, as we in the 'serious business' crowd all to often say, fuck you right straight up the asshole. but methinks it has something to do with what that avowed genius of our times called 'redefining reality while you in the reality community take note'. er something like that.
Take that Strunk and White.
The fact that my writing is most closely analogous to William F. Buckley's is a fact which has begun to, slowly, but with real punch, seep, into my humorless, but still functioning despite it's 1) alcohol soaked floppiness, and 2) much noted, all the more ironically so given what follows, pea-brain, and which, while it gives me pause, in some sense, tells me there is something fundamentally okay about the world.
Though for the life of me, I can't imagine what.
"Doesn't CR's forecast of a housing "bubble" and "credit crunch" totally discredit your point of view, that such extreme events can't be foreseen?"
Well, I don't think you can consider this an "extreme" event, given that it was forseable, forseen, and inevitable.
Unless by "extreme" you mean, extreme in its damage.
I've seen a few "extreme" car wrecks. When you fall asleep behind the wheel after a fifth of scotch, you tend to make something that is relatively rare and extreme, (like an ugly fatal car crash), pretty predictable and inevitable.
This "housing bubble" and "credit crunch" may be rare, but certainly can't be considered an "extreme" in the the hoocudanode sense.
Seb,
"Doesn't CR's forecast of a housing "bubble" and "credit crunch" totally discredit your point of view, that such extreme events can't be foreseen?"
No actually it doesn't. Throw me a 4 Sigma event. Oh wait we've got BSC, a 5 Sigma event. Never mind.
Cheers,
Per Clive Crook in the FT in December:
"Normally it falls to conservatives to cry "moral hazard" when policies such as this, expressly designed to reward imprudent behaviour, are announced. "
"This" being gov't programs that rescue people who are underwater on their mortgages.
When the programs are the repeal of gov't regulations and oversight, there's not a whisper out of these cowards.
It beggars the imagination that sometime and drive-by commenters could castigate the blogmother, who took time out from her Sunday to jot a tasty, funny post for our entertainment, accusing her of verbosity, (which is her style,) because they have ADD.
Here's your sign.
Misean,
I am still cheesing (that's for you lawyerliz!) over the statistical wizardry of last August, when market participants declared both a "26 sigma event" and "a one in 10,000 year event that happened three days in a row" (1 x 10^12 or thereabouts)...
Vizzini: Inconceivable.
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.
It's divide and conquer. If consumer/workers cannabalize each other and blame each other, there will be no social/political movement for change. The corrupt in power win and the power corrupts absolutely. Blame should start at the top. But we are a nation divided and it will be match, game, and set for the Powers That Be(Fed, executive branch, congress, big money, etc.)
All you blaming the victims of ponzi scheme bubble scams bust cycles/fire sales are working for the Man.
I had wanted to point out how funny it is that, every once in while, the administration actually admits that what its' just done was in fact...
UTTERLY and COMPLETELY ILLEGAL
The only thing funnier is that somehow, and I have to admit, I have absolutely no idea of how...
NO ONE NOTICES.
Did you notice that in their own announcement the bright guys who own your sorry little asses, just told you, that the bailout of Bear Stearns was illegal, that they had in fact exceeded their legal mandate? hmmmm....
Don't worry, will fix that, says the man behind the curtain... We'll make it legal! Ta Da!
Am I the only person on the planet who is starting to think that maybe the 'bailout of Bear Stearns' wasn't a 'bailout' at all, but rather the first example of a wall street brokerage having sufficient political muscle that it was able to use the federal government's powers to assist in it's take over of a competitor?
And like, if that is is going on then maybe there like isn't really a federal government at all anymore?
Gee, and you thought I called myself VoiceFromTheWilderness for nothing.
Misean,
I am still cheesing (that's for you lawyerliz!) over the statistical wizardry of last August, when market participants declared both a "26 sigma event" and "a one in 10,000 year event that happened three days in a row" (1 x 10^12 or thereabouts)...
Yep.
It couldn't be that, oh say, the model they're using to make these calculations doesn't quite conform to reality.
The idea that these finanial wizards don't have the entire world as we know it wrapped up into a few neat equations just isn't plausible.
I for one am looking forward to our daily 10,000 year flood when the markets open tomorrow.
Thanks Tanta for your post.
I suppose you could have shortened it...
But you could also shorten the Bible to say: "Love God and obey the golden rule.",
or, instead of telling your child the story of the boy who cried wolf, well you could just say "don't lie" and save yourself some time.
You could also shorten Moby Dick to "some dude goes after a white whale and dies."
Heck, just the phrase "Boy meets girl and all hell breaks loose!" could literally free up miles of bookshelve space in your local library, making more room for computers for even the financially impaired bloggers who want it all and want it now.
Thanks again.
I know this blog is highly respected, but reading a few of Tanta's posts, which sound mostly like just rants, makes me wonder where all the hypes come from.
What is it, Tanta, rum or wine?
VoiceFromTheWilderness | 03.30.08 - 3:38 pm
They're counting on people not knowing they've been hoodwinked. With so many apparent imbeciles running amok in our culture, I think they'll probably pull it off.
Saw a trash out just down the street from me. Makes you wonder why the didn't take all that stuff with them. (Furniture, bikes, etc)
There is so much meat in today's papers to discuss and we get this S^&(l$@C. I'm going back to bed. Wake me when The Tudors starts.
Nemo writes:
They begin to grasp that they had only ever been given a short-term lease on the "American Dream," not a piece of the "ownership society" pie.
Um, no. What they were given was an opportunity that they abused by buying something they could not afford, because they hoped it would make them wealthy.
I have no sympathy for these people, and neither should anybody else. This is not about making jokes or making fun of anybody.
It might be a crime (although damaging property that legally belongs to you doesn't sound like a black and white crime to me). It is at minimum a violation of your mortgage contract (I remember seeing language about insuring, maintaining and not damaging the property). But banks are businessmen who are familiar with risks. They knew or should have known the likelihood of this "mess" as well as the likelihood of the vandalism that would ensue. But all they were interested in was a paper profit to get there next annual bonuses. And they knew how many people were being pushed into homelessness because rents in the bubble areas were so unaffordable due to their artificially inflated values. And they knew how many people were buying into the bubble out of the perceived necessity to have a stable housing payment that wasn't prone to 20% rent increases every year (I have lived in cities like that, and after 5 or 6 years a very cheap market becomes almost unaffordable - then what do you do? quit your job and move somewhere cheap without a job? Yes, the freemarket will always take care of us, or anihilate us for the greater good)
I don't know what's more offensiveness about people like you. Your smug simplemindedness, or your soulessness. But today I'll go for the smug simplemindedness.
Disenfranchised powerless paupers with no hope for the future lose morale and faith in the system. The masses will begin to operate in the manner of those above them. Without conscience and in a narcissistic pattern. What you see is what you get. There's no incentive to be honest in a corrupt, avaricious system. The looting of worker/consumers' lifetime savings and nest eggs can't end well. There will be resentment but as long as it doesn't jell into a movement for change, the growing legal/'justice'/prison system will deal with discontent as corruption at the top remain intact. Yahoo. Deal or no deal people. Let's say no deal to the takeover of the system by the elite pension, retirement, and savings raiders.
Tanta writes:
I once responded to a suggestion from the surgical oncologist who had only recently removed 48 centimeters of my intestinal tract that "you've got more guts than I do." That might have elicited a grin, but it also wiped one off some's face, as it were./i>
I had the same operation. I said "You've turned my colon into a semicolon!"
Yes Tanta you understand all this better than almost anyone. What you might not understand completely, is how lacking in understanding most of them are, and now irrational they get when angry, frustrated and cornered. People that angry don't worry about being sensible and rational. To ask or expect them to be so is a bit irrational itself.
"NO BAIL OUT.
NO BAIL OUT.
NO BAIL OUT."
You are winning no hearts and minds to your cause. You just aren't. I take seriously your right to your cause. I am giving you some advice.
Now for the other side of the argument:
BAILOUT.
BAILOUT.
BAILOUT.
People that angry don't worry about being sensible and rational. To ask or expect them to be so is a bit irrational itself.
Well, of course.
But people who are angry about other people who are so angry they aren't rational, are another story.
I see no reason why I can't get angry about those who are angry about the angry. Especially when it produces people who are angry because I'm angry at the anger over the angered.
It did all start because McArdle claimed she didn't "get" this anger. I never actually said I approved of it; in one part of the post I did even slip in the claim that I don't. But I do understand it.
Apparently, to some people, even to understand these ex-homeowners' emotional state is to have gone beyond the pale.
It reminds me of the old stale pogroms that used to go on in the name of "moral clarity," which always seemed to end up meaning "moral ignorance."
Misean said: "No actually it doesn't. Throw me a 4 Sigma event. Oh wait we've got BSC, a 5 Sigma event. Never mind."
Well, in returning to the introspective tone of Tanta's original blog, I would pose this question to you: If you know this to be a bogus indicator (my yield-curve model), why so threatened by it that you feel the need to go out of your way to denigrate it, and me, when it's not even the topic of discussion? (Even a serial thread-hijacker like me didn't bring it up this time, you did.)
Just something to ponder. When I critique CR's charts and data I try to use specific examples of how his indicators can generate false signals, so that everyone can follow along and see what I'm looking at.
Sebastia
From a purely selfish point of view:
It is OK for people who are losing their home to trash it.
Doing that will lower real estate prices more and that will be good for renters (which is what these homeowners will now be).
Remember, from a renter's point of view: the more that real estate crashes, the better.
Not nice to say, but hey, let real estate come down MUCH more. Better opportunities for the ones who didn't buy into the frenzy.
Outstanding writing Tanta, well done. Brilliant little piece.
A new fan.
Anonymous said: "It is OK for people who are losing their home to trash it.
Doing that will lower real estate prices more and that will be good for renters (which is what these homeowners will now be)."
This gives me an idea of what the next big "thing" will be in the media coverage of the housing "bust": Evicted homeowners who are in cahoots with renters (or other home-buyers, legitimate or not) that deliberately trash their home for the express purpose of reducing the rent/asking price.
Ought to be at least once or twice that it could happen, which would be good enough to indicate a national "trend", by media standards.
))
S.
Copy what bottom lover said above...
I must admit I find it astonishing that a piece basically saying 'people shouldn't be surprised when other people do dumb things when they are angry & foreclosure makes a lot of people angry' gets 200 plus angry comments.
Makes me wonder how many folks live & work around 'real people' - you know the kind of people who sometimes get foreclosed on. [dryfly raises hand... "I do, I do..."].
The level & intensity of the response to this post tells me Tanta hit the bullseye.
Oh ya - and let me just make my point clear - vandalism isn't 'right' or 'justifiable'... neither is road rage... but that isn't the same as saying it doesn't exist or that it doesn't have root causes.
Nice work Tanta...
I see no reason why I can't get angry about those who are angry about the angry.
Perfect.
Great article. Good piece of writing...all good pieces of writing should leave the reader hanging out there. And there are many comments here I found quite insightful and well-written...AND funny. I'm a new fan of this blog.
OT,
Hey Dry. Remember when you and I were not impressed by the HD share buyback? We both indicated we'd take the dividend?? I had indicated that I wasn't sure anyone at the SEC was following up to make sure companies were carrying through the plans.
Have a look at this:
Shaky HD Supply deal threatens big buyback plan - MarketWatch
Dear Tanta,
Perhaps an inappropriate letter salutation for a comment, but it will have to do (frag?).
I enjoy your posts and the spirited discussion (cliche?), and I read your every post (compound sentence).
Strunk or Strunk and White are wonderful as an inoculation against some of their own injunctions. On writing with too many words, one of my teachers in graduate school used to refer to this thought and wonder: "What is the worry?--that we will run out?" (punctuation). For those who object to the length, I would offer that no one asks, begs or forces them to read the blog or your thoughts, so if they keep coming back, they have few grounds for complaint--obviously they get something from the experience, even if it is only the provocation they need to vent their feelings over English (see below) "as she should be wrote."
The bits of discussion on empathy and sympathy in the first two-thirds of the comments (I confess to having read only that far) were very interesting to me, an aging and aged student of the moral sentiments. The thread might not live up to your expectations, but I found it fascinating as far as I have read and will return to it.
Enough of me and thank you very kindly for the provocation (R.W. Emerson on the word; and another flag on punctuation).
Best,
Haralambos (a professional editor) (not likely the appropriate closing)(more Strunk and White rules needed for parentheses) (yet more needed for the use of [sic]). I will close after this digression, and I am tempted to add the smiley face, but I will not.
Here's an article of what REO departments are doing to stop the trashing of homes.
Buyers' Revenge: Trash the House After Foreclosure - WSJ.com
Remember, from a renter's point of view: the more that real estate crashes, the better.
I thought rents were supposed to be leading indicators, not trailing indicators... In particular, at least here near SF Bay what's been weird about The Bubble is, unlike the steep price run-ups in the late '80s and late '90s, The Bubble wasn't preceded by steep rent increases. Rents were stable ever since the dot.bomb. That's one reason I believed Krugman's Bubble Warnings. Now I'm told rents are increasing, even as home prices crash. I'm not sure how this helps local renters.
I read it three times. "I don't get it!" Why write like that? Should I be impressed? I would have to say I am, but just because my prose sucks and I studied it to see if I could pick out some tips. Sorry but Strunk & White got me through my engineering school's technical writing requirement so hey quit bashing them. Is this an example of how a higher mind communicates? I'm honestly asking because I'll never be able to write like that. I enjoyed it but was left feeling sort of inadequate.
Anyway, my brother and his buddies got busted in the 70's for thrashing a very nice custom house in Carlsbad CA after HS graduation. I think it was a rebellion thing myself. But you might be onto something with this performance art suggestion. People might be willing to pay to see an abandoned house get thrashed if its done real highbrow like.
TANSTAAFL. Now that definitely violates the nutshell rule of words to live by.
Perhaps but Robert Heinlein spent a whole novel explaining the concept. And rambled in a few places explaining how a computer could become sentient by adding a few boxes of memory and random number generators.
The value of Strunk and White is that my professor wanted me to use it so I did to get committee approval of the thesis. Now it sits on the shelf, ignored like all the rest.
and out of the mouths of babes came wisdom.
So true, which is why we read all of Tanta's words with such devotion.
and out of the mouths of babes came wisdom.
So true, which is why we read all of Tanta's words with such devotion.
Yeah, I think Tanta is a "babe"
, too, but more like Circe strewing her pearls of wisdom before us, which makes us,...?
Which sort of explains why I bothered to look up this line from Horace
brevis esse laboro, obscuro fio
Nemo and others -
If you dont get this, then my guess is that you also dont get psychology, ethology, history, economics, political science or Janis Joplin.
One of the most dangerous things that can be done is to put an organism, whether animal, human, state, or corporate, into a position where it has nothing to lose.
When pushed up tight against the wall, any organism is going to resort to desperate measures. When cornered, even a mild animal will attack. With nothing to lose, gamblers, rogue traders and corporations take on rapidly increasing levels of risk just to try to put off the inevitable. With nothing to lose, armies, from Thermopylae to the Alamo, fight to the death. Backed into a corner societies turn to charismatic demagogues like Robespierre, Hitler, Castro and Chavez or to economic systems like communism just to try to relieve their suffering. With nothing left to lose, normally well-behaved, law abiding people grab the torches and pitchforks, man the barricades, burn the cities, erect the guillotines and, yes, even feel free to punch holes in the pink walls that were recently the room of their little daughter.
The reason cash offers to leave the property in an orderly, undamaged fashion work is that they give the occupant something to lose. Without that, its only natural that they feel free to act out their frustration, disappointment and anger at a process that has done them, and a terrible number of other Americans, a great deal of harm.
As the incomparable Janis sang Freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose.
Oops . . . that philosophy fits in a nutshell with a couple of BR and a bath to spare.
OT,
Hey Dry. Remember when you and I were not impressed by the HD share buyback? We both indicated we'd take the dividend?? I had indicated that I wasn't sure anyone at the SEC was following up to make sure companies were carrying through the plans.
Have a look at this:
Bad Request 7D
lama | 03.30.08 - 4:31 pm | #
Thanks lama - getting crazier for sure.
I sure miss banker (Mr. Buy-Back-Always-Good himself)... I'd love to ask him if he now thinks those buyback plans a year ago were smart or if those companies should have held their cash?
CathyG, lovely exposition of what's waiting for us on the other side of "NO BAILOUT": NO EXIT.
Janis is not covered by the nutshell rule because she was smart enough not to be offering a "philosophy." She stuck to art, which is a whole nuther matter.
Tom,
Properties falling helps renters who, one day, want to buy.
It would suck to pay rent only to see property values get further and further from your reach.
But if your renting (and hoping to own one day), even if rents are going up slightly, you are "saving money" as property values continue to come down.
I'm a renter NOW. I was an owner a few years back. Lucking timing because I thought this would happen. I happened to guess right.
Now as a temporary renter (from my selfish perspective), LET REAL ESTATE CRASH!!!!
If real estate crashes, which it is...unemployment will increase which it is...and everyone will be at risk of insolvency which they already are. Careful what you wish for...but some people who have no mortgage or savings, maybe don't care what happens to consumer/workers exposed to graet risk of collapse. Again in the middle class and below are cannabalizing and condemning each other. This works for the maintaining THE system. We are becoming a numbed down society of bitterness for our neighbors. Look up the ranks to see what's what really wrong with our 'globalized' economy.
dryfly, what do you plan to do in the off-season?
Janis is not covered by the nutshell rule because she was smart enough not to be offering a "philosophy." She stuck to art, which is a whole nuther matter.
ooh, close but no cigar. you would have got a gold star if you had said: "...which is a whole nutter matter."
For such a great blog this must be the most pointless waste of words I have ever seen.
If real estate crashes, which it is...unemployment will increase which it is...and everyone will be at risk of insolvency which they already are.
There's lots of remodeling going on in the neighborhood...nonetheless, there's also plenty of people ringing doorbells handing out business cards and wanting to know if they can remodel something. I'm guessing whatever remodeling is going on can't begin to keep up with the loss of new house construction jobs in the exurbs.
Keep It Simple, I'm Stupid writes:
dryfly, what do you plan to do in the off-season?
Keep It Simple, I'm Stupid | Homepage | 03.30.08 - 5:25 pm | #
Work... and fish some... and read CR. Won't be long though & we'll be reading about the incoming recruits & hoping they can fill some holes. They got holes they need to fill - BC sure proved that.
Re: Anti-Boomer Comments
Baby Boomers are the driving force behind America. You're really going to effin' tell me that "the blame starts on top" when the generation that has the power, and will hold onto the power due to demographics is all set to make sure they don't get any of the negative effects of their choices? The same generation that has basically repeated over and over "if you vote for a third party candidate you are throwing away your vote" keep believing that because somepoint everyone who says that is going to die and be replaced by people who believe that those who were labeled as "crackpots" are actually pretty rational.
You're telling me the people who were conceived and lived under boomer-rule can't make a reasonable judgements about their parents? The same boomers who gave trophies and ribbons to everyone? The same boomers who care more about making sure everyone makes it from 1st to 6th grade in 6 years instead of legitimately holding people back? The same boomers who have driven our divorce rate up due to their own selfishness? The same boomers who bombard everyone else with their ED pills? The same boomers who do buy their teenagers BMWs, Mercedes Benz, Audi's... heck the fact that its so common for teenagers to even have cars (I think my children are going to be locked up)... the same boomers who are so delusional that their children are "good children" when most of are fools who love to drink and sleep with as many members of the opposite sex as they can (I'm sure for 15 years this has been called "college", but I don't think college was the same in 1970 as it is now)... the same boomers who look down on poor people and who started the whole political divide in the first place (hey you don't have to buy the BS that liberals and conservatives are so different... I know many co-workers with different fews and they are all decent people... so why do our leaders love to push those polarizing issues in front of us?).
These same boomers are going to lead us from the ashes, solve all of our problems, punish the people who they haven't punished for 20 years plus? Hah! Of course the boomers are the least impacted by all of this housing stuff because they are the ones who were first time buyers 30 years ago... and they are also the ones who told everyone "housing prices can only go up". So in some way boomers suck because they don't realize the fact that their generation is so huge has caused a bit of a housing bubble... and they are trying to keep their housing prices inflated due to personal self-interest... sighsighsighsighsigh...
Someone convince me that the collective boomers aren't the ones who have been driving this country off a cliff for the past 10-15 years... what other demographics are the driving force behind all of this? They have the money, the power positions... everything... and you're going to tell me boomers aren't pushing all of the bills into the next generation?
At the risk of offending Tanta, I am going to say that I am tired of these "I am way smarter than anyone else" type of posts. Deconstructing a 5 line post for 2 hours? Come on ... do something useful with your brain.
Yeah, I think Tanta is a "babe"
, too, but more like Circe strewing her pearls of wisdom before us, which makes us,...?
I was thinking more along the lines of Pythia, the priestess presiding over the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi.
Circe strikes me as being a little too vindictive, turning men into swine (redundant as we already are such).
Tanta wrote, Let me therefore do my obligatory least by pointing out that this kind of thing just has to stop
But this is Jane "2x4" Galt we're talking about here!!
RiskingIt:
Nicely put
At the risk of offending Tanta
Nope. You'll have to try harder next time.
I have any number of character flaws--I suppose the ability to generate lots of uproar over a couple of lines of text is one of them--but getting "offended" is not usually my style. If by that you mean taking these disagreements personally. I'll certainly enter the fray and give as good as I get, but trotting out the "you offended me" card isn't my cup of self-pity.
You are free to dish it out as much as you like. I may dish back if I get bored enough, but I promise not to stalk out in a huff because you've upset my tender sensibilities. Fair enough?
Otherwise, I have no real idea how to respond to such a backhanded "compliment," so I just generally don't. I guess I'm not grateful enough that you acknowledge that I have a brain that I will knuckle under and display it in a less provocative manner. I admit I have some experience with the "you should be doing something better with your time/talent/energy/life than whatever it is you happen to be doing right now" bit of "well-meaning" advice, and that experience has never been good.
So if you do think I'm being a touch self-indulgent by writing something like this on a blog, I'd hardly disagree. Whether I need to indulge you instead is, of course, the interesting question.
--
I fully understand that some of you inadequates need a punching bag.
Go ahead, make my day!
Jas
Well said, CathyG.
Or as was said in another time, in another place, "On n'a rien a gagner a emmerder les gens qui n'ont rien a perdre."
So, I read Megan's burp, (I thought they only had "Megans" on TV,) hoping for some profundity. OK, not profundity; maybe a second paragraph.
Alas, I shrugged.
The "not getting it" is the privileged class's inability to place themselves in any other milieu but their pampered surroundings. Interesting to see similar reactions here.
"I didn't get caught up in the mess. So those people must be stupid, or worse, cupid.
They shouldn't have tired to buy a house if they couldn't read through thirty pages of legalese." (when they were hammered incessantly by swifties screaming NINJA or forever be priced out!)
"That could never happen to me." Sure. Right.
The rank insensitivity to where most* of the culpability lies betrays the lack of mere vestiges of empathy.
Read up some time on how the Railroad Barons used to rob widows. Showing up for work constituted 1% cn; a catastrophe for the widows.
I must have been ensconced in the basement the day the planes flew over, emitting those clouds of vapor that wafted down and gave everyone else amnesia. Because, you know, I clearly remember all those citizens' groups pooling their rolled pennies, nickels, and dimes to bombard the banks and mortgage companies with radio and TV campaigns begging the banks to lend every last dollar they could invent.
The sad fact is that bad things do happen to good people. I'd venture to guess that bad things might just happen to good people more often because they don't have their guard up, looking for the con.
If people knew more than their lawyers, they wouldn't need them. If they knew more than their banker, they wouldn't need them either.
[running out of steam]
Thanks, Tanta. Tasty tidbit.
DEFLATION---HOWSWEETITI... whatever.
Tanta is dead on right and frankly, it's about time people started calling out those who write and "report" under fancy mastheads. mcmegan is the intellectual equivalent of a Happy Meal and about as mentally nutritious.
Tanta, it was a brilliant post and well written. The humour was spot on and your point was correct. How about "shove it up your @ss" in response to these mewling detractors?
Ummm, YLSP, I'm a boomer and I didn't do any of those things either.
As far as I can see, virtually all ranks and ages in our country participated in the nonsense to a degree--why are you so bitter? In fact, I marvelled at the fact that so many young marrieds expected to buy a house upon marriage; I certainly didn't expect that. We lived in a $75.00 a month (including utilities) walk up apt in Balto in '66 when we got married. Just under the roof--the tarred roof--with no ac. We were however, happy.
We occasionally walked a few blocks in the snow.
We bought a nice house 4 years later,hated the small town it was in. Left and bought a cheapie and went to night school and worked all day in Miami. We were happy. Very tired, but happy.
I am not asking for any gold (or glod) stars, we just worked our way up as we were told way the way to do it.
Some people in all generations are jerks.
And I'm not just cheezin'.
And I don't see any even slightly funny put-downs or amusing irony in your rant.
The post was supposed to be somewhat related to humor.
Hey LawyerLiz,
I've got one or a dozen people in similar situations to mine down around Miami way looking for representation.
Drop me a line if you know anyone of your profesional education who may be at all interested....
I apologise for straying off topic and probably feeding trolls, but the anti baby-boomer comments on this and other blogs are (I hope) worthy of comment.
Get used to it....
There are a lot of us that have come to hate everything that the boomers have come to stand for.
The richest generation in the richest country in the entire world; the recipient of the one-time generational dividend; the generation that was going to change the world; and they blew it.
And now you're surprised that the rest of us. The ones that the boomers figured they could stick with the bill aren't happy about it.
There is a generational war coming and guess what, you're going to need us more than we need you.
Dry,
Dirk van Dijk also gave us a lecture about buybacks increasing EPS, etc. Maybe we can ask him?
Generational War is B.S. Clue: The following generation eventually inherits everything the previous generation.
Now, granted, a given generation can invest in consumption and not capital, resulting in a larger coffin for granddad but sh-ttier schools for his grandchildren, but I've seen nothing to indicate that Gens X & Y are any superior to the BB. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I have been buying foreclosure properties for more than ten years, and has seen the inside of roughly 500 properites in their raw (before being fixed up) condition. I have seen probably two properites that were intentionally vandalized. Although I may frequently use the term 'trashed' to describe a property where everything needs to be replaced to make it saleable, more often than not the wear on the house is the result of deferred maintenance and/or heavy wear from teenage boys. This vandilism problem you speak of just doesn't exist where I live.
just when I thought it was safe to skip CR to catch up on a home improvement project (I know...'big waste of time'-save it.) I see I missed out on a great post and some 300 comments of lively discussion.
I really loved 'trash-out refi', btw, and I recommend Tanta just take full credit for that one, even if she didn't technically come up with it herself. Alexander Graham Bell didn't invent the telephone either, but nodoby seems to care that Antonio Meucci got shafted on that one.
People might be willing to pay to see an abandoned house get thrashed if its done real highbrow like.
there is/was a karaoke bar in Japan that would allow patrons to smash up a pre-decorated (smashably so) room.
Very cathartic for the over-stressed and under-empowered salarymen, reportedly.