Contributors

Showing posts with label Bernie Sanders. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bernie Sanders. Show all posts

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Monday, October 19, 2015

Hilz and NH

Check out Hillary's poll numbers in New Hampshire. She was trailing Bernie pretty badly until the debate and now it looks like she's basically even with him.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Crushing It

Hillary wasn't the only one who absolutely crushed it last night at the debate. All five candidates showed exactly why the Democrats are the party that should run the federal government. They actually (gasp!) talked about the issues, showed what a team looks like, and offered valid and comprehensive solutions to our nation's problems. In short, the behaved like adults. Not only would any one of those candidates be a decent president but each of them completely buries all of the rest of the GOP field in terms of both substance and style.

The Nation has a great piece up about why the GOP is doing so poorly these days.

The GOP finds itself trapped in a marriage that has not only gone bad but is coming apart in full public view. After five decades of shrewd strategy, the Republican coalition Richard Nixon put together in 1968—welcoming the segregationist white South into the Party of Lincoln—is now devouring itself in ugly, spiteful recriminations. "...  At the heart of this intramural conflict is the fact that society has changed dramatically in recent decades, but the GOP has refused to change with it. 

Americans are rapidly shifting toward more tolerant understandings of personal behavior and social values, but the Republican Party sticks with retrograde social taboos and hard-edged prejudices about race, gender, sexual freedom, immigration, and religion. 

This contrast was massively on display last night. The Democrats understand the shift that has been occurring since President Obama took office. The Republicans don't and are hilariously going in the opposite direction. Conservatives can't even govern themselves for pete's sake.





Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Four More Hats In The Ring

Since the last update on the 2016 presidential election, four more candidates have officially announced their candidacy for the presidency.

On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont, has decided to challenge Hillary from the left. Smart move as it's going to keep her honest. He raised 1.5 million dollars and added 100,000 supporters in one day so this isn't a novelty run. There are many Americans out there who support his vision for America in what is an ever growing progressive base. I look for Hillary to continue to move to the left with Sanders in the mix.

On the Republican side we have Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, and Mike Huckabee. I don't expect much traction for these three as they polling pretty low behind the clear top tier candidates...Bush, Rubio, Walker and Paul. Bush and Walker haven't officially announced yet, btw, and I have to wonder what the fuck they are waiting for. Of all of these, Huckabee has a shot of winning enough southern states (and maybe Iowa) to stay in the mix but he seems all news to me.

So, we have 2 on the Democratic side and 6 on the GOP side. Anyone else out there looking forward to the first GOP debates?:)

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Son of Trying Again


The clearinghouses that run the inner circle of the derivatives market are very exclusive. As the article details, banks try get into to the club only to be rebuffed for "having too little capital." But that's not the real reason.

“We are not a nobody,” said Sanjay Kannambadi, chief executive of BNY Mellon Clearing, a subsidiary created to get into the business. “But we don’t qualify. We certainly think that’s kind of crazy.”

The real reason the bank is being shut out, he said, is that rivals want to preserve their profit margins, and they are the ones who helped write the membership rules.

Mr. Kannambadi said Bank of New York’s clients asked it to enter the derivatives business because they believe they are being charged too much by big banks. Its entry could lower fees. Others that have yet to gain full entry to the derivatives trading club are the State Street Corporation, and small brokerage firms like MF Global and Newedge.

Preserve their profit margins...exactly what I have been saying all along. And these committees, not the government, write the rules. Great. Please let's continue to have more shit and paranoia blamed on the government so these assholes can continue to rip people off.

So is there a way to quantify all of this? No. Why?

The precise amount that banks make trading derivatives isn’t known, but there is anecdotal evidence of their profitability. Former bank traders who spoke on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements with their former employers said their banks typically earned $25,000 for providing $25 million of insurance against the risk that a corporation might default on its debt via the swaps market. These traders turn over millions of dollars in these trades every day, and credit default swaps are just one of many kinds of derivatives.

The secrecy surrounding derivatives trading is a key factor enabling banks to make such large profits.


Super! So nothing at all has changed since 2008. Ah well, let's just say it's all the fault of the government and move on. These guys running these clearinghouses are all rugged individualists simply reaping the benefits of a free market. We need to leave them alone because it's clear that their market is perfectly competitive. The government just needs to get out of the way and watch the economy take off. Except, how can it when these people ARE TAKING ALL OF THE MONEY!

Since I know some of you aren't getting this yet, here's another way to look at it.

And the profits on most derivatives are masked. In most cases, buyers are told only what they have to pay for the derivative contract, say $25 million. That amount is more than the seller gets, but how much more — $5,000, $25,000 or $50,000 more — is unknown. That’s because the seller also is told only the amount he will receive. The difference between the two is the bank’s fee and profit. So, the bigger the difference, the better for the bank — and the worse for the customers.

It would be like a real estate agent selling a house, but the buyer knowing only what he paid and the seller knowing only what he received. The agent would pocket the difference as his fee, rather than disclose it. Moreover, only the real estate agent — and neither buyer nor seller — would have easy access to the prices paid recently for other homes on the same block.

Wow, that's fantastic. And this is perfectly OK with 30 to 40 million of you?

But listen, I can feel many of you still digging in your heels as you always do and refusing to accept these facts. Let's keep going because I know your knee is jerking to that ol' classic, "Let Loose the Market (And Watch It Take Off)."

Mr. Griffin said last week that customers have so far paid the price for not yet having electronic trading. He puts the toll, by a rough estimate, in the tens of billions of dollars, saying that electronic trading would remove much of this “economic rent the dealers enjoy from a market that is so opaque.”

Tens of billions. Staggering. So where is the government again? Oh, that's right...neutered in the corner by Tea Party hysteria.

Under the Dodd-Frank bill, the clearinghouses were given broad authority. The risk committees there will help decide what prices will be charged for clearing trades, on top of fees banks collect for matching buyers and sellers, and how much money customers must put up as collateral to cover potential losses.

There is so much anti-government fervor out there that conservative Democrats, feeble minded wankers that they are, are succumbing to zillions of falsehood riddled with paranoia. People like Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown are painted as Nazis...choking the "poor and helpless" derivatives market out of their money and giving it to a lazy, lower class useful idiot with a flat screen. The more we fail to recognize that men like Sanders and Feingold are our last line of defense, the more our country decays.

Basically, what we are doing is blowing up our air force on the eve of a major aerial conflict because a little over a third of our country is afraid of flying.