'Years' worth of data'?

Insufficient if they did not consciously look at the household debt to income ratio and look for an analogous period -- The Great Depression -- for performance of mortgages.

Idiots.

I am happy to have taken their money.

"Years' worth of data"

This is the logical equivalent of watching 70 pulls on the slot machine, not seeing the jackpot hit and then concluding that the probability of a jackpot is zero (and the casino no longer needs to reserve money for future jackpots). Idiots!

If it wasn't for those rating agencies, I would have watched Ishtar. God bless em.

Km4: I like your anger. I didn't vote for many years, and got crap from people from not doing so. Now I realize that not voting is actually a vote.

I did call both senators from my sad ass state when the tarp votes were happening. Despite Diane Frankenstein getting 90% of calls againt the bailouts, she voted for it. Same with punch drunk Boxer.

F em all.

Kudos to the This American Life folks for the best financial reporting from the MSM this year. There should be a phrase akin to "regulator capture" to describe what has happened to business journalism (CNBC, BusinessWeek, WSJ, ...).

The best thing about rating agencies is the annual junket in Vegas with the hookers.

maximum entropy := pure bullsh*t

OMFG, so OTS was incentivized through regulator fees to go pitching for business, as had been through a tough patch post S&L, found Countrywide and looked the other way, and the NPR is still debating whether there are or are not loopholes in the system or a few bad apples??

Words fail.

C

/edit, actually no they don't, words just have a hard time capturing what a fkup a system is that not only allows regulatory capture but actively sets it up between regulators to close deals like they've got M&A fever and then give the regulated an easy ride.

Sometimes ratings agencies pay better than Wall Street firms so they get better talent. No place pays talent better than Vegas. Those strippers and hookers could save our financial system if only they had better incentive.

They must have edited this bit out..

"See the guys wanting the rating showed up with a really big pile of cash.. I mean REALLY big, not just big-big, but holy-crap-that's-a-big-pile-o-cash big. So naturally when someone with that big of a pile of wants a rating with gave it AAA+++. People who claim our ratings are bogus fail to realize just how big a pile of cash they had. "

• splat

Didn't Congress pass a law saying

rating Agencies couldn't be sued ?

See! ... See how smart Congress is ...

They curtailed all that litigation !

Trojan Whores...

"It looked like a lot of Greek letters."

More thread music

YouTube - Beck - The Information

The information is ravenous
The ticker tape feeds the mind
Looking for a lost transmission
A heaven that we left behind
When the information comes
We'll know what we're made from
And the skyline rising
Highrise eyes see for you

Say hello to a mannequin
The ghost of our lonely tongue
Reaching out ??
I was ?? down below
When the information comes
We'll know what we're made from
The skyline rising
Highrise eyes see for you

She's the sister of avarice
A wife of a poisonous tongue
She's the eye of a battle of stones
A sister out of control
When the information comes
We'll know what we're made from
The skyline rising
Highrise eyes see for you

Well, not completely. Others won't see the edited version unless they manually refresh. I didn't want to add that kind of change management complexity and server load.

If your edit comes in before the browsers of others refresh, they will see the change. And the good news is, refreshes happen on demand (you may notice a quick update when you scroll to the end).

But it's not perfect.

People don't plan to have kids. They are always a mistake. Mike Brady was gay for god's sake.

I was actually just thinking about how the coming hardships will produce a better generation than the world has seen lately. There will be fewer of them, but they will be tempered in the fire. Fifty years from now, when prosperity has finally returned, what will they accomplish?

I suspect maximum entropy is just a way of developing bespoke test criteria for the model in question, instead of using F or chi-squared off the rack. Could be defensible, in any case not automatically garbage.

Now, as to the "years of data" and the actual model itself, … Those are where I get to pokin' gingerly.

If a baby goat is called a kid, shouldn't a baby human be called a goat?

I suspect that maximum entropy is just a code word for plausible deniability.

Sounded great in meetings...

Elvis is in the building. Welcome.

Elvis
If a baby goat is called a kid, shouldn't a baby human be called a goat?

Ham in Canada=American Bacon?

If you sit around and make up code words, Calculated Risk is Frolicking Ninjas on Crack with Butter Knives. Just saying.

Michael Moore's next film will be about

the biggest heist in history ...

Loved "Sicko" ...

I'm sure Mr Moore will have many

Rating Agency "Stars" in his film ...

I defied gravity one night and now I am the dad of a goat.

Comrade Coinz

Gray Davis has to bee enjoying some of this ...

Wall Street paid better than the rating agencies. The agencies only got the "B" team people.

It has nothing to do with ability; neither did securitization. It has everything to do with incentives.

So for those interested...

'bout two years ago, I mentioned in the comments section that I was I was busy buying sterling silver flatware sets on ebay and suggested others look for opportunities. Pedestrain I know - but an easy opportunity. Here are the results:

23 sets
Money in, including shipping: $11,650.00
192 pounds of sterling silver

Solid investment!! A three bagger in less than 30 months.

A pain but worth the effort. A very favorable tax allocation ta boot.

(ps I reserved a few 1 pound bars just in case)

Charlie Rose, enjoy William Greider & Naomi Klein.

Naomi Klein and William Greider Discuss the Economic Crisis on Charlie Rose | Naomi Klein

Barley

Good job bro. Don't blow it all on comic books

If not, what happens to all the 30 year fixed rate mortgages that don't meet GSE criteria?

The criteria is changed. Look what they did for CMBS's.They change to rules to help them win

Criteria? What criteria?

Elvis (profile) wrote on Fri, 6/5/2009 - 9:28 pm

I defied gravity one night and now I am the dad of a goat.

You've got to be kidding (or have already kidded).

Is "American Life" like the cover of irvinehousingblog.com's book?

Dunno, norma. Looks like the snoring continues.

YouTube - America Snoring

nytol

C

nova - good job on the (real) silver dollars....

Tim gunna shock you here - I'm buying paper with maturity 2024...sounds kinda wierd huh?

Sorry folks have kept a low profile - for my own good. Now that that has passed...off to the races.

lawyerliz,
Funny you live in Polk. My grandfather used to live there... Winter Haven... Cypresswood. Spent many days there tooling around in a golf cart.

These were considered the "brightest minds" in business and or academia. These so called bright lights were really incandescent.....that is to say when the light was on it obviously deprived them of the required amount of oxygen for their brains to properly function.

I am afraid it WAS an IDIOCRACY.

OT, & I'm not sure the link will stay alive or good, but a beachwalker in Curry county (south coast of OR) reports that someone rode his/her sailboat through the surf, onto the beach, & then just walked away.

It seems to the boat just sat there for a few weeks & will now be transferred to the nearest boat basin.

Guess it better than just scuttling it. Is there such a thing as boat abandonment & after that it's salvage? Link includes photos.

MILE 27 on 5/1/09

Hey, that's weird, the new auto-refresh feature doesn't honor the ignored users setting.

Ah, that's better.

Barley,

I applaud your creativity; but jesus crist are you paying attention or what?

You don't have to buy flatware to make money in silver,and you probably are wasting your time on a lot of junk.

I told you, just buy SLV or SLW. What in the f*ck are you trying to prove?

Silver is all about squeezing the shorts. You want stuff you can sell in a few minutes' notice, once the shorts are by the gonads and everything is spiking in your favor.

Flatware?

F*cking A. Some people never learn.

These guys aren't idiots, they've been trained from birth for this. Finance is the perfect venue for wielding collective power and denying it exists. ..by eyelevel

They are'nt smart either; but your second second sentence is spot on. We have an aristocracy which denies it's existence and which does not serve the republic anymore. They need to go if the republic is to recover. The alternative (the finance types retaining their power) is not pretty...

rich, some folks like the tactile nature of bullion and/or near-bullion...

think of it as a hybrid between a smart ebay play and a smart commodities play.

and, incidentally, one could say the same thing about why you wouldn't want dgp...

--that used a methodology called maximum entropy
That is a statement that would make Orwell blush. If there is one thing that economics disregards (out of necessity, because it would invalidate all economic theory and practice) is physics.
Economics need superstition as a reference point for it's existence.

William Greider gave a lecture in SF the other night that I attended. When at Rolling Stone in the 70's, He and Thompson provided some of the best political analysis of all time for a relatively main stream US publication.

Since money is so fungible and my government is giving my SS money to BofA and other banks, how about I put $90K on my BofA and other cards and not pay it back? Since it is my SS money which will be valueless by the time I get it back 20 years from now, how about I extract it now from the unsecured credit cards I have and use it at today's value since money is so fungible? Sort of like this guy.
YouTube - I'M BACK

CR,

Janet Yellen gave a talk that broached three topics of interest:

- The monetary policy transmission mechanism
- Asset price bubbles and monetary policy
- The inflation objective and the zero bound

President's Speech: Closing Panel Presentation (06/05/2009)

rich is from the new-old school....

btw, peas are from real green plants and not cans..so rich, get a grip

In 1966 I was sorting quarters and selling the 40 silvers for $12.00 at the local coin shop..

Can you name that tune in 3 notes?

TARP Repayments may exceed $50 Billion

"Who rates the rating agencies?"

Aye, there's the rub. Ratings agencies should have their compensation basted on the performance of their ratings. Say their entire basket of AAA has to have <X% of failures for them to be paid. Once their bottom line is affected then they might have some real value. As it is, they are just payola. A fee that must be paid to get Gov and pension funds to invest.

kcoop, why am I now seeing Michael again, with no Ignore button?

Although I'm not an expert, my impression matches that of previous posters that "entropy maximization" is a recognized modelling technique. The phrase is not in and of itself proof that something bogus happened.

What is needed is somebody with subpoena power digging up instances of management ordering recalculation of ratings.