Welcome to Detroit Sports Forum!

By joining our community, you'll be able to connect with fellow fans that live and breathe Detroit sports just like you!

Get Started
  • If you are no longer able to access your account since our recent switch from vBulletin to XenForo, you may need to reset your password via email. If you no longer have access to the email attached to your account, please fill out our contact form and we will assist you ASAP. Thanks for your continued support of DSF.

Frontline: Money, Power, and Wall Street

deathroh

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 2, 2011
Messages
4,626
Did anyone watch the first two parts of this series? I have it DVR'd and watched the first hour last night and was pretty engaged. I came across the review linked below...didn't really agree with much of it, to me it seemed like they pretty plainly laid the problem at the feet of the banks. I also thought they explained CDS well enough, and that it was obvious that Deutsche Bank was a big culprit, with the interview with their CEO being pretty laughable. I can see the point about being overly kind to JP Morgan, but the rest... I'm interested in hearing what those of you that are more plugged in to the finance world think about this.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/frontlines-astonishing-whitewash-of-the-crisis.html

Then there's the comment section. Is "PBS = A propaganda tool for the left" a common thought?
 
Did anyone watch the first two parts of this series? I have it DVR'd and watched the first hour last night and was pretty engaged. I came across the review linked below...didn't really agree with much of it, to me it seemed like they pretty plainly laid the problem at the feet of the banks. I also thought they explained CDS well enough, and that it was obvious that Deutsche Bank was a big culprit, with the interview with their CEO being pretty laughable. I can see the point about being overly kind to JP Morgan, but the rest... I'm interested in hearing what those of you that are more plugged in to the finance world think about this.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/frontlines-astonishing-whitewash-of-the-crisis.html

Then there's the comment section. Is "PBS = A propaganda tool for the left" a common thought?

I've read a few books on this; I think Vic's read "The Big Short" too. You absolutely have to read that one. it's by the same guy who wrote "Moneyball."

long story short... anyone who argues that greedy consumers are to blame is so ill-informed that it's not even funny. this was systemic fraud at every level of the housing industry, and banking industry, coupled with pro-business regulators (I'm including the Obama administration in this part) who by design are only in office to look the other way, and then bail out the banks.

you could draw analogies to the Visigoths sacking Rome and you wouldn't be far from the mark.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
this article is kinda all over the place, but it has some pretty shocking points: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/04/16/the-1s-hand-in-the-afghan-murders/

This passage is crazy. I wonder what happens to the "blame the consumer" conservative mind, when it turns out that a lot of the consumers here are also members of the military... and of course, they always "support the troops"??? Will their heads just explode?
“The margins on these loans are disaster waiting to happen” and admitted that mortgage lenders deliberately targeted military families like the Bales family, swindling them into signing onto far pricier refinancing loans “that benefited lenders and mortgage brokers” at the expense of vulnerable military families, as well as minorities and low-income borrowers. Another local real estate businessman who specializes in short sales agreed, telling Businessweek that “we set them up.”
“It’s not an unfamiliar story, but it’s sad,” said Richard Eastern, a co-founder of Bellevue, Washington-based Washington Property Solutions, which negotiates short sales. “We’re going to send you off to war but we’re going to foreclose on your home.” He said many lenders offered loans they knew borrowers couldn’t repay. “And it’s not just soldiers, it’s everybody. We set them up.


The extent to which mortgage lenders and banks deliberately preyed on American military families is made clear by this little-known fact: the Tacoma region, home to Fort Lewis-McChord, the largest base in the Western United States and home to 100,000 military personnel and family, suffered one of the worst predatory subprime loan epidemics in the country, an anomaly in the state of Washington. According to Richard Eastern’s firm, roughly half of all home sales in that region are either foreclosures or short sales. As early as 2007, the Wall Street Journal singled out Tacoma as one of the nation’s worst affected regions from subprime plunder.


of course, the didn't only target members of the military, although those cases are pretty egregious, since it's hard to fight foreclosure when you're fighting a war...



same thing all across the board though. hard to fight foreclosure when they forge documents, so you don't even have any idea what you're getting.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I've read a few books on this; I think Vic's read "The Big Short" too. You absolutely have to read that one. it's by the same guy who wrote "Moneyball."

long story short... anyone who argues that greedy consumers are to blame is so ill-informed that it's not even funny. this was systemic fraud at every level of the housing industry, and banking industry, coupled with pro-business regulators (I'm including the Obama administration in this part) who by design are only in office to look the other way, and then bail out the banks.

you could draw analogies to the Visigoths sacking Rome and you wouldn't be far from the mark.

Pretty much the only time the documentary mentions consumers is to point out how lower income and older people were duped by predatory lending methods. It's very sympathetic to the consumer, and does portray the situation similar to how you did above. Just without the strong direct language, which is how you'd expect PBS to handle it.

I think the author in the blog I linked is basically like one of those people who watch a movie based on one of their favorite books. If everything isn't exactly perfect it's a complete fraud.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top