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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"The Great Divide"

20 Comments -

1 – 20 of 20
Blogger John Seiler said...

And we should remember that the homebuilding and mortgage industries manipulated the government to promote easy lending and easy credit. Should the Fed raise interest rates to a reasonable level and should banks do serious credit checks? How un-American!

The rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have been replaced by the rights to easy money, home "ownership," and the pursuit of credit cards.

6/27/09, 8:49 PM

Anonymous Brt said...

The "back of the bus" story has to be bogus. He has straight hair, and no one could confuse him for an African. Also, whence the assumption he's Italian? The names of his parents and wife are not available on the net.

6/27/09, 8:53 PM

Blogger Eric said...

Steve,

I give itulip.com my highest possible recommendation as the best original source of economic analysis. Their ten-year forecasting record has been dead-on; they were the first (in 2006) to call for a Q4 2007 recession. You'll find their commentary to be far more sophisticated and accurate than the simplistic corporate greed/gov intervention explanations.

itulip:economics/investment what isteve:psychology/politics

6/27/09, 9:10 PM

Blogger AmericanGoy said...

"Yet another example of how the sub-prime market was a creature of the profit motive, and not government mandates."

Wow, like the two are not inherently the same.

The people from the private branch get top jobs in the government organs regulating their industries, then go back to the private branch again, and back again to government...

It is an incestuous relationship.

6/27/09, 9:15 PM

Anonymous Alfred Aiken said...

My brain is having trouble with this damned nuance you're trying to introduce.

6/27/09, 10:19 PM

Anonymous simon said...

That bit about 15-35% downpayments sounds significant, though. It does seem to me like the GW Bush drive to end dowpayments explains a lot of why the bubble and collapse occurred when it did, peaking ca 2005-7, rather than decades earlier when the CRA first came into force.

There seems something particularly toxic about Liberal ideology in the hands of "conservatives" like GW. Liberals like Bill Clinton seem to be able to mitigate some of the worst effects of their ideology, knowing where to (quietly) draw the line; whereas liberal-conservatives carry Liberalism's implications through to the bitter end.

Killing-for-peace is another example - Clinton's 'humanitarian' Serb-killing was cautious and circumspect compared to GW's disastrous Iraq attaq.

6/28/09, 12:08 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Article is just more proof that the modern multi-racial society is inherently dysfunctional.

China laughs while the western nations are atomized and weakened by divide & conquer immigration policies.

By the way: let's get that La Raza woman on the Supreme Court already.

6/28/09, 2:00 AM

Anonymous Rohan Swee said...

“The new company [Countrywide] sent Mozilo first to Virginia Beach and then to Orlando. He had never lived outside the Bronx[...]

...When he tans he gets really dark. My mother told me that when he worked in Florida he was asked to sit in the back of the bus.”


I don't have access to the New Yorker article, but I glean from wikipedia that Mozilo's "Countrywide" dates from 1978. If anybody was asking anybody to sit in the back of the bus c.1978 or later in Florida I'm the Queen of Sheba. Am I confused about the timeline here or is this whole backgrounder manufactured out of whole cloth? (Though the back-of-the-bus claim would be slightly less implausible than Mozilo using Orlando public transportation in the first place.)

OT - Time writer comprehensively explains California's woes for you.

6/28/09, 6:27 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think the problem is that both libertarians and liberals have unrealistic views of the way government and business interact with each other. They don't realize that often enough the guys in government and business comes from the same schools and have similar goals and worldviews.

I'm urging my brother Tim to write a follow-up to his book The Big Ripoff, which did a great job explaining how business and government work together.

--John Carney, Clusterstock.com

6/28/09, 6:47 AM

Anonymous anony-mouse said...

Ritholz repeatedly states his opinion that the CRA had nothing to do with the mortgage meltdown since it didn't cover mortgage brokers or the securitizers of MBS's.

He tends to blame the end of Glass-Steagal, bond rating agencies and lax enforcement.

6/28/09, 8:41 AM

Blogger John Anello said...

Government regulation was ultimately the culprit in this. I agree that execs like Mozilo and those at Washington Mutual had taken a bite of the “diversity” apple, but had the government not venerated them as role models for home loan lending the recession would not have been as widespread and as severe.
The market is a much better tool for determining who should receive home loans and who should not, in great part because it is color blind. In a true free market system, if it is determined that a person has good credit and stable income then they would receive a mortgage regardless of socio-racial issues. If the majority of these people happen to be of a particular race, well then that’s just too bad for the diversity crowd.
Without government intervention, zealous diversity worshipping companies like Washington Mutual and Countrywide, that continuously made bad loans to unqualified minorities, would never have grown so large; in fact they would soon have found themselves out of business.

6/28/09, 1:10 PM

Blogger Ritholtz said...

Ha! You clearly are not familiar with my work if you think I am a liberal. (See this for example http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/04/16/cassandras/index.html)

My book Bailout Nation has pissed off people on the left and the right (One chapter is titled "The Virtue of Foreclosure").

I believe in free markets, and that somehow annoys the far left. But I am reality-based, and that seems to confuse and disorient the hard right.

My politics is pragmatic realism and my agenda is identifying what is broken so it can be fixed.

That seems to contradict much of the nonsense spewed by both political extremes. Read the blog and/or the book before name calling

6/28/09, 2:41 PM

Anonymous headache said...

Ritholtz:
I take the liberty of repeating what American Goy (AG) said about your text:


Ritholtz: "Yet another example of how the sub-prime market was a creature of the profit motive, and not government mandates."


AG: Wow, like the two are not inherently the same.


Id' say AG calls it right.

6/28/09, 3:52 PM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

Barry Ritholtz comments:

"Ha! You clearly are not familiar with my work if you think I am a liberal."

Okay, but can you see how your protest shows that you are still missing the point of my post?

6/28/09, 4:37 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Speaking of China, re Anonymous' comment about it laughing at us (which it does): just how long would it have taken their justice dept. to turn Matches into a kidney donor?

6/28/09, 4:47 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Yet another example of how the sub-prime market was a creature of the profit motive, and not government mandates."

Wow, like the two are not inherently the same.

Indeed.

If you can make a quick buck while doing politically correct things, you are golden. At least until the bottom drops out. Then you may be indicted....

6/28/09, 5:40 PM

Anonymous Dutch reader said...

I don't have access to the New Yorker article, but I glean from wikipedia that Mozilo's "Countrywide" dates from 1978. If anybody was asking anybody to sit in the back of the bus c.1978 or later in Florida I'm the Queen of Sheba.

Yeah, in 1978, when John Travolta (Saturday Night Fever 1977, Grease 1978) and Al Pacino (The Godfather 1974/1978) were big stars, nobody wanted to accept an Italian in American society.

6/28/09, 7:57 PM

Blogger Eric said...

Finally, even if government and business had been sensible, the brute fact of population change in California, replacing middle class people with peasant class people, would have caused massive problems in generating enough productivity to repay debts.

But it wouldn't have mattered, since no bank in its right collective mind would have given money to those people in the first place.

6/29/09, 10:56 AM

Anonymous silly girl said...

Ritholtz.


"I believe in free markets, and that somehow annoys the far left. But I am reality-based, and that seems to confuse and disorient the hard right. "


Will you support getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by declaring them bankrupt (because they are) and liquidating their assets?

Would you further assert that banks be allowed to only make loans that they believe are profitable?

Show us the pragmatism that says no bank has to make loans to any unqualified applicants even if that means that only a fraction of minorities can afford to buy homes.

Show us the pragmatism!

6/29/09, 1:33 PM

Anonymous Patel Motel said...

I think the problem is that both libertarians and liberals have unrealistic views of the way government and business interact with each other. They don't realize that often enough the guys in government and business comes from the same schools and have similar goals and worldviews.

Google "public choice economics".

6/29/09, 5:35 PM

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