They sure did slap AAA ratings on complete fiction, tranched MBSes in these packages called CDOs which were packed with toxic debt...
They were not reformed. This is the reason I have such serious issue with credit rating agencies. Their ratings on sovereign debt can literally cause a national economy to crash. Therefore they have more power than that nation and should be 100% regulated and made completely independent in order to evaluate sovereign credit. (nation's credit).
This is one of the major "you've got to be kidding me" things that was not done in the "financial reform" bill, they also pretty much let these same derivatives keep operating as they have been through loopholes on OTC trading systems which remove any transparency or objective pricing. I think it was 90% were exempt, something like that.
S&P, along with Fitch and Moody's, were right in the middle of the nasty derivatives scam that crashed the economy. Now they downgrade it as a result of their original lies that lead the the current crisis. What else would we expect.
"These credit raters were also essential to the process of packaging sub-prime mortgages into extraordinarily complex securities that would later become the "toxic assets" trapped on the balance sheets of banks around the globe. The process began with investment banks buying hundreds of mortgages and packaging them together into a byzantine security to sell to investors. Since the sheer complexity of this new security rendered it effectively impossible to analyze, investors relied on credit ratings to determine just how risky it was. Fueled by a false confidence in rating-agency credibility, the market for sub-prime mortgage securities exploded between 2001 and 2006 from about $100 billion to over $1 trillion.
Reporters, analysts are still reading the documents and I couldn't write an overview of what has been found until now. Some stories are timeless, and this is one of them.
I think Killing Us Quickly made a credible case that the trend in legislation, Medicare in this case, is to get rid of citizens in an unambiguous way. But the studies cited on the relationship between unemployment and death caused me to revise the theory a bit. The initial effort to get us "off the payroll," as it were, occurs during various periods of job loss. If that doesn't work, then a life of unaffordable, but much needed, medical care starting at age 65 is the fail safe. These people are, if nothing else, relentless.
It is NOT that Ryan hates geezers, it *IS* that he likes campaign bribes from the insurance industry. $125 million last year to both parties kept single-payer off the table.
FOLLOW THE MONEY! Don't let them distract you with non-related issues. It is now and always has been cash bribes. They work!!!
and calls bullshit on politicians, you know it's bad. They have been, good for them, but I look at it more they know the nation isn't going to make money if the people don't save money. In other words society becomes so top heavy it implodes upon itself.
is among those rarest of unitedstatesian activities. fortunately, the killerpublican debate will so confuse voters that they'll demand the status quo and put the debate to rest until the next election. on second thought, it's a jobs proposal. think of all the telemarketing jobs that will open to solicit your health insurance business?
More people need to get involved. We must all pull together to get it done! Like the Republicans have the Tea-baggers, the Democrats need the populist to push back. If we don’t, we will turn into a very dreadful country. We are almost there now. Remember big business don’t care about you. There is greed out there of an unprecedented nature. It needs to be stopped before things turn ugly.
Come on, the corporate lobbyists and billionaires will only let win who will do their bidding, so Obama loses, you'll get Romney or another one who will do the exact same agenda items.
That's why there is little difference between Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama.
The Wisconsin congressman's proposed Medicare fix sure sounds wonderful, but it would leave the average Medicare recipient befuddled at best and on a path toward financial catastrophe at worst.
The save that for us. Clearly, debt is the strategy, as you note, and it's been put in place for a while. the bankruptcy reform legislation of a few years ago exempted medical related debt. How clever of them.
Social Security will require a hat trick, though. They need the payroll taxes rolling in to subsidize their favorite giveaways. Wonder ho they will do that? It's dead, no benefits, but you have to keep paying the tax;) That would be the ultimate beat down.
The Democrats should have howled from the roof tops in unison, non stop, when this was released. It's their time right? Not so. They bagged out on the Social Security and Medicare issues in 2010, not much of focus, if any real focus on this at all. Why? Because they don't care. They'll just play the dutiful role of sparing partner and take the dive when they're told. FDR, Truman, and JFK would be solid at DEFCON 4 by now. But nary a peep (in a serious and coordinated way) from the Dems.
Obama was elected because he promised to end these unfair trade agreements. He has no excuse for selling american workers out. That's why Trump will be elected, or Jesse Ventura/Ron Paul. Obama will not get a second term.
I think the plan goes like this. Raise all these costs thru the roof, eliminate SS too (raise retirement age and cut the benefit). Then, pass a few laws that re-institute debtors prisons. Then pass a few more laws that say when you die, your debts are passed on to your children and that your estate has to pay all of your debts first, especially ones owed to banks. So that when you die, and have racked up tremendous health care bills that had tried to keep u alive, then all those bills stick around and your children and grandchildren (heard that phrase before, could it be related?) get the joy of working to pay off all those bills. Or maybe they have to sell that small business that's been in the family for 4 generations. Or maybe they sell dad's favorite guitar that was given to him by his mother when he was 14. Either way, somebody gets to pay all those debts and it's not gonna be the money party that suffers.
It is prescription drugs that are 13% of the Medicare budget, so when Obama pointed out reducing costs by negotiating better prices, I was thrilled (which is rare these days from team Obama) because that's a no-brainer. I'd further suggest the FDA start doing their jobs. How many of these new "still under patent protection" drugs which cost over $3 a pill end up killing people or not working any better than one which is generic, or worse?
As far as this 5%, I think something else is wrong here. In Europe and Japan there are all sorts of "bad habits" yet they don't have these problems to this degree. i.e. they eat tons of sugar, they smoke, they don't exercise....and they eat, in Europe anyway, bacon fat and duck fat.
In terms of overall health I smell a rat in the U.S. that might possibly be linked to foods allowed into the U.S. and promoted that these countries ban.
Finns, as an example, drink like fishes, yet they are in better health (and they smoke).
In terms of cost reduction, I think they have to look at the supply and not the patient. For example, did you notice knee replacement is way above average in the U.S.? Do Americans knees go out more? I doubt it, more I suspect that's highly profitable and some patients are getting a "diagnosis" based on marketing and PR "seminars to spot the signs" of a knee that needs "to be replaced".
So, I think we have MDs acting more like CFOs on where the profits are, medical supplies to drug companies giving "seminars" to hospitals and doctors to "Spot the signs" so they "diagnose" the problem as somehow needing their product, versus real health care.
Seriously, if one takes statistics on say Medicare and then let's just look at knee replacements paid for by Medicare vs. the general population and then say the world.
Normalize for age or break down the statistics per age bracket....
I could not be surprised at all to see magically people who are poor and having some sort of disability, not related to their knees, needing knee replacements in comparison to people who are not poor, yet do have a disability.
i.e. someone is chopping out people's knees to make money.
I think there are a host of examples like this because of the for profit system.
I also think we have lobbyists in our food supply, manufacturing good knows what that makes people get fat and sick much easier than other countries.
We have pharmacies these days selling your detailed prescription data to cable companies so they may do "targeted marketing"....
so I'm sure pharmacies are concerned about drug interactions, nope, that shows no respect for their customer and major privacy violations.
It is interesting to reflect upon another empire and its decline and fall. This is a simple extract from a website. Even though it is another time in history the reasons are eerily similar and there are a lot of factors as is the case now.
There are adherents to single factors, but more people think a combination of such factors as Christianity, decadence, lead, monetary trouble, and military problems caused the Fall of Rome. Imperial incompetence and chance could be added to the list. Even the rise of Islam is proposed as the reason for Rome's fall, by some who think the Fall of Rome happened at Constantinople in A.D. 1453.
They sure did slap AAA ratings on complete fiction, tranched MBSes in these packages called CDOs which were packed with toxic debt...
They were not reformed. This is the reason I have such serious issue with credit rating agencies. Their ratings on sovereign debt can literally cause a national economy to crash. Therefore they have more power than that nation and should be 100% regulated and made completely independent in order to evaluate sovereign credit. (nation's credit).
This is one of the major "you've got to be kidding me" things that was not done in the "financial reform" bill, they also pretty much let these same derivatives keep operating as they have been through loopholes on OTC trading systems which remove any transparency or objective pricing. I think it was 90% were exempt, something like that.
S&P, along with Fitch and Moody's, were right in the middle of the nasty derivatives scam that crashed the economy. Now they downgrade it as a result of their original lies that lead the the current crisis. What else would we expect.
"These credit raters were also essential to the process of packaging sub-prime mortgages into extraordinarily complex securities that would later become the "toxic assets" trapped on the balance sheets of banks around the globe. The process began with investment banks buying hundreds of mortgages and packaging them together into a byzantine security to sell to investors. Since the sheer complexity of this new security rendered it effectively impossible to analyze, investors relied on credit ratings to determine just how risky it was. Fueled by a false confidence in rating-agency credibility, the market for sub-prime mortgage securities exploded between 2001 and 2006 from about $100 billion to over $1 trillion.
The ratings were bunk. Many mortgage-backed securities that earned AAA ratings -- the highest grade a rating agency can bestow..." American Prospect, Ratings Agencies Discredited, Mar 20, 2009
Time to shut these scams down. Excellent alert and analysis.
I completly agree Oz!!!
Your story has nothing to do with this subject...
Reporters, analysts are still reading the documents and I couldn't write an overview of what has been found until now. Some stories are timeless, and this is one of them.
It's all about turning the U.S. into a proletariat. What are the odds average live expectancy will drop at this point?
I think Killing Us Quickly made a credible case that the trend in legislation, Medicare in this case, is to get rid of citizens in an unambiguous way. But the studies cited on the relationship between unemployment and death caused me to revise the theory a bit. The initial effort to get us "off the payroll," as it were, occurs during various periods of job loss. If that doesn't work, then a life of unaffordable, but much needed, medical care starting at age 65 is the fail safe. These people are, if nothing else, relentless.
way -
It is NOT that Ryan hates geezers, it *IS* that he likes campaign bribes from the insurance industry. $125 million last year to both parties kept single-payer off the table.
FOLLOW THE MONEY! Don't let them distract you with non-related issues. It is now and always has been cash bribes. They work!!!
Jack Lohman
http://moneyedpoliticians.net/
You'll love this one, half of meat is full of bacteria and it's the strains which are antibiotic resistant.
and calls bullshit on politicians, you know it's bad. They have been, good for them, but I look at it more they know the nation isn't going to make money if the people don't save money. In other words society becomes so top heavy it implodes upon itself.
is among those rarest of unitedstatesian activities. fortunately, the killerpublican debate will so confuse voters that they'll demand the status quo and put the debate to rest until the next election. on second thought, it's a jobs proposal. think of all the telemarketing jobs that will open to solicit your health insurance business?
More people need to get involved. We must all pull together to get it done! Like the Republicans have the Tea-baggers, the Democrats need the populist to push back. If we don’t, we will turn into a very dreadful country. We are almost there now. Remember big business don’t care about you. There is greed out there of an unprecedented nature. It needs to be stopped before things turn ugly.
Come on, the corporate lobbyists and billionaires will only let win who will do their bidding, so Obama loses, you'll get Romney or another one who will do the exact same agenda items.
That's why there is little difference between Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama.
Paul Ryan's Medicare 'reform' hocus pocus
The Wisconsin congressman's proposed Medicare fix sure sounds wonderful, but it would leave the average Medicare recipient befuddled at best and on a path toward financial catastrophe at worst.
By Allan Sloan, senior editor at large
The save that for us. Clearly, debt is the strategy, as you note, and it's been put in place for a while. the bankruptcy reform legislation of a few years ago exempted medical related debt. How clever of them.
Social Security will require a hat trick, though. They need the payroll taxes rolling in to subsidize their favorite giveaways. Wonder ho they will do that? It's dead, no benefits, but you have to keep paying the tax;) That would be the ultimate beat down.
The Democrats should have howled from the roof tops in unison, non stop, when this was released. It's their time right? Not so. They bagged out on the Social Security and Medicare issues in 2010, not much of focus, if any real focus on this at all. Why? Because they don't care. They'll just play the dutiful role of sparing partner and take the dive when they're told. FDR, Truman, and JFK would be solid at DEFCON 4 by now. But nary a peep (in a serious and coordinated way) from the Dems.
Obama was elected because he promised to end these unfair trade agreements. He has no excuse for selling american workers out. That's why Trump will be elected, or Jesse Ventura/Ron Paul. Obama will not get a second term.
MERS, banks, securitizers, attorneys (gasp), rating agencies, all engaged in a scheme to defraud. Jail time and massive forfeiture might be in order.
Of course they will settle out of court for a dollar bill and a gag order.
I think the plan goes like this. Raise all these costs thru the roof, eliminate SS too (raise retirement age and cut the benefit). Then, pass a few laws that re-institute debtors prisons. Then pass a few more laws that say when you die, your debts are passed on to your children and that your estate has to pay all of your debts first, especially ones owed to banks. So that when you die, and have racked up tremendous health care bills that had tried to keep u alive, then all those bills stick around and your children and grandchildren (heard that phrase before, could it be related?) get the joy of working to pay off all those bills. Or maybe they have to sell that small business that's been in the family for 4 generations. Or maybe they sell dad's favorite guitar that was given to him by his mother when he was 14. Either way, somebody gets to pay all those debts and it's not gonna be the money party that suffers.
Bring Down Health Care Costs.
It is prescription drugs that are 13% of the Medicare budget, so when Obama pointed out reducing costs by negotiating better prices, I was thrilled (which is rare these days from team Obama) because that's a no-brainer. I'd further suggest the FDA start doing their jobs. How many of these new "still under patent protection" drugs which cost over $3 a pill end up killing people or not working any better than one which is generic, or worse?
As far as this 5%, I think something else is wrong here. In Europe and Japan there are all sorts of "bad habits" yet they don't have these problems to this degree. i.e. they eat tons of sugar, they smoke, they don't exercise....and they eat, in Europe anyway, bacon fat and duck fat.
In terms of overall health I smell a rat in the U.S. that might possibly be linked to foods allowed into the U.S. and promoted that these countries ban.
Finns, as an example, drink like fishes, yet they are in better health (and they smoke).
In terms of cost reduction, I think they have to look at the supply and not the patient. For example, did you notice knee replacement is way above average in the U.S.? Do Americans knees go out more? I doubt it, more I suspect that's highly profitable and some patients are getting a "diagnosis" based on marketing and PR "seminars to spot the signs" of a knee that needs "to be replaced".
So, I think we have MDs acting more like CFOs on where the profits are, medical supplies to drug companies giving "seminars" to hospitals and doctors to "Spot the signs" so they "diagnose" the problem as somehow needing their product, versus real health care.
Seriously, if one takes statistics on say Medicare and then let's just look at knee replacements paid for by Medicare vs. the general population and then say the world.
Normalize for age or break down the statistics per age bracket....
I could not be surprised at all to see magically people who are poor and having some sort of disability, not related to their knees, needing knee replacements in comparison to people who are not poor, yet do have a disability.
i.e. someone is chopping out people's knees to make money.
I think there are a host of examples like this because of the for profit system.
I also think we have lobbyists in our food supply, manufacturing good knows what that makes people get fat and sick much easier than other countries.
We have pharmacies these days selling your detailed prescription data to cable companies so they may do "targeted marketing"....
so I'm sure pharmacies are concerned about drug interactions, nope, that shows no respect for their customer and major privacy violations.
It is interesting to reflect upon another empire and its decline and fall. This is a simple extract from a website. Even though it is another time in history the reasons are eerily similar and there are a lot of factors as is the case now.
There are adherents to single factors, but more people think a combination of such factors as Christianity, decadence, lead, monetary trouble, and military problems caused the Fall of Rome. Imperial incompetence and chance could be added to the list. Even the rise of Islam is proposed as the reason for Rome's fall, by some who think the Fall of Rome happened at Constantinople in A.D. 1453.
http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/romefallarticles/a/fallofrome.htm
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