Joe was rambling like a drunk Englishman…first we’re talking about America, and then Joe breaks in ranting about Europe??! Who cares about France’s downgrade?! we’re talking about American inequality!! Then he starts ranting about the gov’t being to big and big-gov’t republicans and democrats – which again, has absolutely NOTHING to do with the issue of inequality, it’s related tangentially, but it’s really just a right-win talking point….Joe at his worst this mornin!!

Yea the ‘big’ part of our government protecting Companies.  Company profits and holdings at all time highs just like the disparity between the rich and poor.  Finance companies inflated home prices then simply stole the money away from everyone that worked hard to buy a home.  Thanks for the lecture Joe…

This had the potential for being a very good discussion. But, you’re right, Joe was sloppy and incoherent. And, it wasn’t just on this segment, it was the entire first 1 1/2 hours. I stopped watching at 06:30 Hours, US CST. He does this from time-to-time, and it truly destroys the segment, at times, the show.

this is perfect

Orman has gotten into the faux financial biz (ala Dave Ramsey) because her investment advice was mediocre at best – she’s usually behind the S&P 500.  she’s just another infomercial person hawking her wares and making a buck off those who don’t know better

romney is proposing lowering taxes on the !%, making the bush cuts permanent, military intervention in iran, gutting financial and environmental regulations, gutting health care reforms, changing medicare to vouchers, reducing programs which help the poor and middle class,increasing the military budget and going back to using torture. if that’s not radical, what is?

I know the ‘Big Gov’ Joe is talking about. The one that started 2 wars they didn’t paid for, expanded medicare + they didn’t pay for, Tax cut at the time of  2 wars they didn’t pay for, No child left behind, uncollected taxes (by giving big corps to bring their money in from abroad without paying the right due), corporate welfare etc. These kinds of Big Govt Joe? 

Must have been the Monday morning blues. 

I love the format of this show, but Scarborough ruins it by his incoherant- rambling rants…This man must love to hear himself talk, but please for the rest of us that enjoy hearing other opinions, make this man less visable…Talk about not having a core, I think he forgets what he says from segment to segment….Shut up for a while Joey, and give that pie hole a rest….My favorite time is when he is on vacation or sick……

American inequality? Yes, America is the 1%. Our “poverty” is ridiculous wealth in much of the rest of the world. We are highly unequal.

Finance companies don’t inflate home prices. Demand inflated home prices.

How do you suppose mortgage companies “stole the money” that they laid out for homes whose value then crashed? They stole their own money?

Obama is why Europe was downgraded. Contagion started here in Obama’s tenure

Actually cited in S&P’s downgrade memo was among other things ‘weak’ prospective ‘growth’ in the downgraded countries and that is due to the aggressive austerity measures that were implemented at exactly the wrong phase when growth and thus expantionary monetary policies is what was called for, a known antidote in recessionary cycles

Orman is right that there’s little for poor people to do to get out of poverty, and that’s because Socialism, i.e. Elizabeth Warren’s ideology, prevents them from doing that in the first place. That’s the whole friggin’ point of the system, keep the unwashed masses down and keep the rich people rich.

But aside from that, who’s taking advise from Orman on anything? Her show is a laughing stock! It’s nothing but a buncha welfare recipients asking her if they can take a Caribbean cruise and she’s regarded as some financial genius because she tells them no. And along with all these hucksters on CNBC, she performs worse than the S&P 500 consistently.

It’s always price and terms.  The terms got ridiculously easy.  Deadbeats took advantage.

Joe is always ranting about how Medicare is going to bankrupt out country, like today. Accusing Dr. Sachs of “demagoguing”, talking all over everyone, come on man, chill! Medicare premiums have been going up at far LESS the rate than my private (Kaiser) health insurance ones have, which have risen about 20% a year, for the last 15 years! Our problem is the private insurance companies, & their obscene rate & profit increases! If we got with the rest of the world, and provided everyone with healthcare, at HALF the cost, this would all be a moot issue…. 

But then what would Joe rant about….?

And demand derives from access.

Unfortunately for America, inability to show progress on debt reduction was a factor in the US downgrade. So that works both ways it seems. 

Typical liberal dribble, Joe made perfect sense unless that is that you are so indoctrinated to big government you can’t see the forest through the trees…  I especially liked how the conversation opened, another big government liberal absolving the middle class for their risky behavior with credit, multiple credit cards and home equity lines to make purchases that they could not afford…  but alas it is not the creditor’s fault, of course not the American people are not equipped with the educational background to do the simple math…  What CRAP!  Great liberal attitude to think that they are the only smart people in the room…  I can’t tell you how many times I heard when I was young that if you can’t afford to pay for it in cash, you just can’t afford it….  But our own self indulgence lead us to our condition…  but not in the eyes of the liberal, it is always some mean corporations fault…  LOL!

Finance companies inflated the price of homes?  They did so at the bequest of the federal government.  Regulators were constantly reviewing bank loans and penalizing banks who did not make what they considered to be a sufficient volume of low income risky type loans at very competitive terms and rates…  They used expanded and new regulation under the old Community Reinvestment Act to do so…  Both the Democrats in congress and then president Bush sung the phrases of this activity.  Big Government again playing on a field where it does not belong leads us into a mess and then points the finger elsewhere.  As usual the dems excoriate business for playing along the path that the government pointed them down while refusing to hold the government accountable to the role that they played in this mess…

You guys still today refuse to look at the damaging effect of government spending on our economy…  Seniors can’t survive on the interest income that they have historically depended upon for their retirement income because the government keeps printing money under the guise of Quantitative Easing because the foreign markets will not buy our debt…  the said purpose of Quantitative Easing is to hold interest rates low, yes that seems to be a necessity as how could our government afford the bill on a 16 trillion dollar debt?  It certainly is not to stimulate the economy no matter how much the government lies about that as the Fed is paying near record highs on excess reserves to the banks to keep their money off the streets…  Now just how much is today’s dollar really worth, is the government not stealing America’s wealth for itself with the printing of all this money, do you really think that a 100,000 dollar savings account has the same purchasing power today as it did 10 years ago?  Let’s see gold ten years ago sold for about $300 an ounce, now it is about $1625 does that give you an indication of what your government is doing to the middleclass of this country?  First their policies lead to the devaluation of American homes, the largest asset that most families have and the source of wealth for most families, followed by the devaluation of their savings and retirement accounts through deficit spending and monetary policy….  only to be topped off by flattened interest rates so that there is no safe investment vehicle for modest return or stability of savings…  

Yes, you libs have it figured out…  you truly are the smartest people in the room…

“another big government liberal absolving the middle class for their risky behavior with credit, multiple credit cards and home equity lines to make purchases that they could not afford…  ”

It was an equal partnership Jack, not just a big government/liberal problem (Joe even says as much, calling Romney and Bush big government Republicans.)  To paint it as one-sidedly as you do demonstrates your lack of knowledge in how we came into this crisis in the first place.  Sure, there are plenty folks who can be [rightly] blamed for taking out home equity lines and ARMs that they couldn’t afford to pay back.  However, the pervasiveness of the subprime mortgage/credit crisis points to the illogical and near-sighted incentive sysytem built in for those who were selling these adjustable rate mortgages, to the point where a good friend of mine who worked at Wells Fargo would regularly witness his colleagues flat out lying to customers, telling folks that they were getting a flat-rate mortgage and tricking them into signing the paperwork for an adjustable rate.  Now ultimately, if you sign your name to something,  you are  responsible for it, but the deceitful nature of those selling practices must be condemned as much as the folks who knowingly took out crap mortgages, because in the end Joe Taxpayer was the one who had to come in and save everyone’s ass, or at least that’s what we were sold during the “too-big-to-fail” TARP bailouts.  The pressure to make these shady loans to unknowing customers came from the top in the form of job-dependent pressures to meet near-impossible sales goals, which were adjusted every quarter and virtually always in the “up” direction. The Wall Street aspect of it comes in because these mortgages were bundled into tranches, which were in turn bundled into mortgage bonds that were simultaneously insured and bet upon in the securities exchange.  The “geniuses” at investment giants like Bear Stearns and Goldmann Sachs found out how to manipulate the individual mortgages among different tranches of a bond so that they could still keep the median household income of a particular bond relatively the same.  By doing this, they fooled the credit ratings agencies into rating these bonds AAA (very high) when many of these should have been rated as low as BBB, or worse.  The insurance giants like AIG were tricked into thinking they were insuring traditional (i.e. secure) mortgage bonds, when in reality there only needed to be something like a 5% default rate in many of these mortgage bonds to sink the entire fund.  Well as we saw, the default rates went much higher than 5% in many cases, and AIG found out far too late the degree to which they were exposed (enter Joe Taxpayer.)  The end result was much of the middle class finding out far too late that their 401Ks/investment funds had shrunk substantially as a result of investor ignorance, since this was the lifeblood fueling these risky positions on subprime mortgage-backed securities. 

All of this is to say, it’s far too complicated a situation to just say it’s a liberal or conservative problem.  Everyone should know not to buy what they can’t pay for, but in the end if we’re frantically being told that we “have” to bail out investment giants like Goldie and insurers like AIG, then I want safeguards in place (i.e. regulation) to make sure that doesn’t happen.  That shouldn’t be confused with absolving those who went underwater on their own volition.  It’s all about making sure average taxpayers aren’t unknowingly subsidizing investor ignorance and greed with their retirement accounts. 

“another big government liberal absolving the middle class for their risky behavior with credit, multiple credit cards and home equity lines to make purchases that they could not afford…  ”

It was an equal partnership Jack, not just a big government/liberal problem (Joe even says as much, calling Romney and Bush big government Republicans.)  To paint it as one-sidedly as you do demonstrates your lack of knowledge in how we came into this crisis in the first place.  Sure, there are plenty folks who can be [rightly] blamed for taking out home equity lines and ARMs that they couldn’t afford to pay back.  However, the pervasiveness of the subprime mortgage/credit crisis points to the illogical and near-sighted incentive sysytem built in for those who were selling these adjustable rate mortgages, to the point where a good friend of mine who worked at Wells Fargo would regularly witness his colleagues flat out lying to customers, telling folks that they were getting a flat-rate mortgage and tricking them into signing the paperwork for an adjustable rate.  Now ultimately, if you sign your name to something,  you are  responsible for it, but the deceitful nature of those selling practices must be condemned as much as the folks who knowingly took out crap mortgages, because in the end Joe Taxpayer was the one who had to come in and save everyone’s ass, or at least that’s what we were sold during the “too-big-to-fail” TARP bailouts.  The pressure to make these shady loans to unknowing customers came from the top in the form of job-dependent pressures to meet near-impossible sales goals, which were adjusted every quarter and virtually always in the “up” direction. The Wall Street aspect of it comes in because these mortgages were bundled into tranches, which were in turn bundled into mortgage bonds that were simultaneously insured and bet upon in the securities exchange.  The “geniuses” at investment giants like Bear Stearns and Goldmann Sachs found out how to manipulate the individual mortgages among different tranches of a bond so that they could still keep the median household income of a particular bond relatively the same.  By doing this, they fooled the credit ratings agencies into rating these bonds AAA (very high) when many of these should have been rated as low as BBB, or worse.  The insurance giants like AIG were tricked into thinking they were insuring traditional (i.e. secure) mortgage bonds, when in reality there only needed to be something like a 5% default rate in many of these mortgage bonds to sink the entire fund.  Well as we saw, the default rates went much higher than 5% in many cases, and AIG found out far too late the degree to which they were exposed (enter Joe Taxpayer.)  The end result was much of the middle class finding out far too late that their 401Ks/investment funds had shrunk substantially as a result of investor ignorance, since this was the lifeblood fueling these risky positions on subprime mortgage-backed securities. 

All of this is to say, it’s far too complicated a situation to just say it’s a liberal or conservative problem.  Everyone should know not to buy what they can’t pay for, but in the end if we’re frantically being told that we “have” to bail out investment giants like Goldie and insurers like AIG, then I want safeguards in place (i.e. regulation) to make sure that doesn’t happen.  That shouldn’t be confused with absolving those who went underwater on their own volition.  It’s all about making sure average taxpayers aren’t unknowingly subsidizing investor ignorance and greed with their retirement accounts. 

There can be little doubt that the American health insurance system inflates healthcare prices. Providers have a known pool of those able to secure treatment and medication from those who are insured, and the exact obscenely high prices from them. Nothing else explains the inordinately high costs we bear compared to other developed nations.

Please don’t mistake me for a partisan ideologue or a fan of the banking industry.  Even though my value system more aligns with the platforms offered by the republicans I also recognize that as politicians they rarely say what they mean or mean what they say…  

The point of my rant was not to absolve the banks of their responsibilities in the crisis nor to claim that they had acted with moral integrity leading up to the crisis…  The point that I was making is that it was government intervention that started us down the path that lead to the crisis by pressuring these banks to make these loans and this has been well documented.  That the large majority of folks who signed those loans should have been smart enough to sit down and evaluate their family budgets and understand what they could or could not afford and it is disingenuous to absolve them of their own responsibility in what happened next. It would be nice if people took responsibility for their own mistakes instead of looking for a scapegoat..  

My sense is that we have too many enablers such as Ms. Orman who blatantly states that we as a people are not educated enough to understand our mortgages…  that is BS…  and if true it only points to another big government failure as when they tried to save our education system by dumbing it down to accommodate students who really did not give a crap about education and who would not take advantage of the learning offered to them…  well great, we now not only don’t educate these children but now we don’t educate even larger percentages of our youth…  so now we don’t just leave the few behind, but we leave bunches more behind so that they will have plenty of company in their ignorance…  another liberal success!

I see Ms. Orman again making the case that the government is the answer when I see government as a primary contributor to the failure…  Just so you do understand, I think that the banks acted highly unethically in their role leading to the crisis as well, they were drunk on the commissions they gained but creating and then selling these loans off to investor’s relieving themselves of the risky paper that they had created, it was working too right up to the point that the house of cards came crashing down…  but let’s go back to the beginning…  it was started, facilitated by and pushed hard by the government who wants to act as if they had no role in the destruction that they have created.  Now we have a bunch more misery heaped on by the fiscal policies of this government that liberals look to for salvation, they are only headed down a road of destruction as they spend money that they don’t have, a macro equivalent to the same destruction of American families and their mismanagement of the credit extended to them by our greedy banking industry…  how is the fed printing money and lending it to banks at near zero interest so that they can purchase federal debt to sustain an insatiable appetite for spending that they can not support any different than American families taking on debt that they could ill afford…  it would be laughable if it were not such a serious problem….  Our country is headed for the same fate that some many of our fellow citizens have recently experienced…  it is simple math..  and does not require an advanced economic degree to see where it is all headed..  Do you think that Quantitative Easing can really play out as long as the federal government will need it to to avoid the next crisis?, and is this policy fair to the American people? Our government has lost it’s way and their only answer seems to be more government…  which in my mind is the root of much of our distress. 

I would hit “like” if not for my dated (and inconsistent) Internet Explorer; I definitely agree with most of what you had to say, especially with regard to the way government pressures dating back to the CRA lead us into the current credit crisis.  I appreciated your well-researched opinion and clarification(s). 

This is sad to say, but I have found there are very few people you can trust nowadays.  If you can’t read the small print, you are in trouble.  Banks, Insurance companies, mortgage lenders etc. are all on the take.  The bottom line is profit.  The world worships money and they will do anything to get it.

The U.S. is recovering slowly under Obama’s policies even though the GOP is doing everything it can to hinder him but Europe is getting worse under present day austerity measures.  Ask yourself why.

Hey, I hate the banking industry, I can’t point to any other industry that I feel takes advantage of everyday Americans as they do, but I also feel that there is an unholy relationship between the banks and our government, and to me that is the larger of the two crimes…  I am amazed how people do not hold politicians accountable to the messes they create and then try to blame the greed of outside agency for the role that they eventually played in causing distress to our citizens…  a good example is the outrage at the influence that the so called special interest groups have over our government…  Yes, I find this to be very distasteful and it bothers me greatly, but I still hold to the fact that these folks have not sworn an oath to the constitution but the politicians that their money purchases have…  I hold the politician accountable first, the corrupt business practices as distasteful as they are to me are not as objectionable as the politician who would sell his office.  I think that when we can show corrupt business activity that breaks our laws we should throw the book at them, but we should be also be making wholesale changes in our representation in the federal government. 

Oh Joe, you may have hurt Suze feelings here. Se being ab BIG Obama supporter!!

Hey, I am sorry that I did not respond more directly to this particular post..  I think that you have done a wonderful and concise job of outlining just what it is that the banks did leading to the crisis.  Great post. 

You are exactly right.

And the sad truth is the GOP has convinced vast numbers in the middle class to buy into to these policies.

I am not suggesting that Joe S. does not raise some valid points about the size of government. But all too often people like him use this argument to divert attention from the serious issues surrounding greed and fraud in the financial sector and the need for reasonable controls.