#OWS Pop Quiz, Part II: How Much Do the Protesters Know About What They’re Protesting?
by MRC TVWe at MRCTV were in New York City’s Zuccotti Park in late October, and one of the things we wanted to do was see how much the people protesting actually knew about exactly what they were protesting. Shortly before we left, New York Magazine conducted an experiment called, “Are You Smarter than a Wall Street Protester?” in which they asked a series of questions to the brave soldiers in attendance. Given the study was done with a pen and paper, Joe Schoffstall figured he’d ask questions and record it on video. In fact, the questions are almost exactly the same, so most of these people could have been polled by the magazine, having an advantage to this basic knowledge quiz.
The following questions are in Part II: (For Part I, click here)
- What is the SEC?
- What is the top marginal income tax rate for the richest 1 percent?
- What does the government spend more money on? Health care and pensions, education, or the military?
The answers:
- What is the SEC?
U.S Securities and Exchange Commission- primary responsibility for enforcing the federal securities laws and regulating the securities industry, the nation’s stock and options exchanges, and other electronic securities markets in the United States
- What is the top marginal income tax rate for the richest 1 percent?
- What does the government spend more money on? Health care and pensions, education, or the military?
Health Care and Pensions- Accounted for 43 percent of government outlays in 2010. Defense accounted for 20 percent.
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62 Comments
I am going to go out on a limb and say ZERO!
it was Jay Leno's show who put it best.
They had a tape of the OWS protestors, to which they played this soundtrack:
'What do we want?'
'We don't know!'
'When do we want it?'
'NOW!'
That, we posit, is perfection…
OWS attendee interview:
Crap… I didn't know there was going to be a quiz…….. You, mean I actually need to know what I'm protesting about, shoot.
You guys should know by now that socialists never let mere trifles like facts or knowledge get in the way of narratives which advance their power.
OWS protester: I came for the girls…
Interviewer: Oh, I thought you were one..
If they knew anything they wouldn't have to be led in chanting meaningless crap. They don't even have meaningless crap of their own. It all belongs to the commune.
Debt Ceiling
Here's another way to look at the Debt Ceiling:
Let's say, You come home from work and find there has been a sewer backup in your neighborhood….
and your home has sewage all the way up to your ceilings.
What do you think you should do
Raise the ceilings, or pump out the sh*t?
Your choice is coming Nov. 2012
Drugs, sex, rage for rages sake and FILTH along with FREE STUFF!!! P A R T Y!!!
Besides, it is good to be out of Mom's basement.
Oh yea, I deserve a corner office, time for social networking, on-line gaming and porn with a 30 hour work week and 12 weeks a year vacation and because I am so smart a starting wage of $150,000.00 a year and NO OVERTIME with full HEALTHCARE that the big greedy corporation pays for.
Just a bunch of WET DREAMS from the PURPLE HAZE.
This group would fail an open book test.
OWS Protester: I am.
The takeaway isn't that they're stupid. It's how they are all over the map they are.
No matter what side people land on, most struggle with the alphabet soup of Wall Street's problems.
There's a largely Republican web site, http://www.city-journal.com, started by the Giulianni camp that gets into issues like credit swaps and weak regulation. Its views, in some ways, are no different than those of informed OWS supporters.
First you hire only union carpenters to raise the ceiling . Then you hire only union plumbers to pump out the sh!t.
Of course, you don't do anything about the cause of the problem which is a bunch of protesters camped out in the sewer.
Hopefully they will all soon be occupying jail cells……………………or hospital beds.
Good thing they have their universal healthcare paid for by the 53%'ers.
OWS Protester: but I might not be tomorrow.
My first instinct would be to blame Bush.
Hey, I got all of the answers to those questions right!
But then I drink tea, and I don't sleep with fleas.
That's to easy…and you're still stuck with house full of _______ fill in the blank!
LMAO…as usual you're hitting on all 8 cylinders.
Never forget: They don't know what the SEC is, but they do know…
"You can have sex with animals!"
"Its views, in some ways, are no different than those of informed OWS supporters …"
… who, judging by the evidence, number around ten. Maybe twelve if we're being generous with the meaning of the word "informed."
There's a reason OWS isn't taken seriously anymore.
What if you get a block? Do you have to stay the same gender recognition?
and they know how to put a condom on a cucumber
REASONS FOR CRASH
You might be surprised CRA is not one of them.
source: Barry Ritholtz – non ideologue.
———————————————————————————
● Fed Chair Alan Greenspan dropped rates to 1 percent — levels not seen for half a century — and kept them there for an unprecedentedly long period. This caused a spiral in anything priced in dollars (i.e., oil, gold) or credit (i.e., housing) or liquidity driven (i.e., stocks).
●Low rates meant asset managers could no longer get decent yields from municipal bonds or Treasurys. Instead, they turned to high-yield mortgage-backed securities. Nearly all of them failed to do adequate due diligence before buying them, did not understand these instruments or the risk involved. They violated one of the most important rules of investing: Know what you own.
●Fund managers made this error because they relied on the credit ratings agencies — Moody’s, S&P and Fitch. They had placed an AAA rating on these junk securities, claiming they were as safe as U.S. Treasurys.
● Derivatives had become a uniquely unregulated financial instrument. They are exempt from all oversight, counter-party disclosure, exchange listing requirements, state insurance supervision and, most important, reserve requirements. This allowed AIG to write $3 trillion in derivatives while reserving precisely zero dollars against future claims.
● The Securities and Exchange Commission changed the leverage rules for just five Wall Street banks in 2004. The “Bear Stearns exemption” replaced the 1977 net capitalization rule’s 12-to-1 leverage limit. In its place, it allowed unlimited leverage for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. These banks ramped leverage to 20-, 30-, even 40-to-1. Extreme leverage leaves very little room for error.
● Wall Street’s compensation system was skewed toward short-term performance. It gives traders lots of upside and none of the downside. This creates incentives to take excessive risks.
● The demand for higher-yielding paper led Wall Street to begin bundling mortgages. The highest yielding were subprime mortgages. This market was dominated by non-bank originators exempt from most regulations. The Fed could have supervised them, but Greenspan did not.
● These mortgage originators’ lend-to-sell-to-securitizers model had them holding mortgages for a very short period. This allowed them to get creative with underwriting standards, abdicating traditional lending metrics such as income, credit rating, debt-service history and loan-to-value.
● “Innovative” mortgage products were developed to reach more subprime borrowers. These include 2/28 adjustable-rate mortgages, interest-only loans, piggy-bank mortgages (simultaneous underlying mortgage and home-equity lines) and the notorious negative amortization loans (borrower’s indebtedness goes up each month). These mortgages defaulted in vastly disproportionate numbers to traditional 30-year fixed mortgages.
●To keep up with these newfangled originators, traditional banks developed automated underwriting systems. The software was gamed by employees paid on loan volume, not quality.
●Glass-Steagall legislation, which kept Wall Street and Main Street banks walled off from each other, was repealed in 1998. This allowed FDIC-insured banks, whose deposits were guaranteed by the government, to engage in highly risky business. It also allowed the banks to bulk up, becoming bigger, more complex and unwieldy.
●Many states had anti-predatory lending laws on their books (along with lower defaults and foreclosure rates). In 2004, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency federally preempted state laws regulating mortgage credit and national banks. Following this change, national lenders sold increasingly risky loan products in those states. Shortly after, their default and foreclosure rates skyrocketed.
Please stop confusing the Flea-Scratchers with facts…it just frustrates them and forces them to turn to drugs, rape, groping, destruction, violence etc…oops, too late.
Not Over.
Excellent points, good analysis, but never the less, CRA was still a driver that started the whole process rolling. CRA was a disaster in the making from day one.
Thank you for that brilliant insight, Captain Obvious.
Here's a great video apparently originating from PJTV that sums up in 5 minutes why we have these "Occupier's" in various cities and then gives us how to fix it all…… Well worth the viewing.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/OAOrT0OcHh0?version=...
Thousands of trees right in front of you, and yet you STILL can't see the forest, can you? The CRA was the entire reason why Wall Street created the derivatives that (supposedly) stripped away the risk of investing in low-quality mortgages. We now know that the products Wall Street came up were total bovine excrement but, hey, hindsight is 20/20.
Why do you suppose "'innovative' mortgage products were developed to reach more subprime borrowers", hmmm? The CRA, because banks sought to shift the risk of carrying these mortgages to other investors (thanks in no small part to volumes of federal regulations concerning asset quality), and it was RAAAAACIST! to discriminate against the borrowers.
Don't even think about falling back on the canard that "none of these firms were covered by the CRA," because it's beside the point. The banks were obligated under CRA, and guess who bought up the mortgages the banks sold and bundled them into mortgage-backed securities? That's right, Wall Street! It had been running a secondary market in these securities for more than two decades before everything blew up.
I'll type the following slowly so that even you might have a shot at understanding it:
The market for mortgage-backed securities and the derivatives they spawned was created by CRA. If there was no CRA, no such market would have come into existence. That all this occurred amid the absurdly cheap money created by Alan Greenspan is merely an aggravating factor, not a cause.
This is very interesting. Thanks for the info. But you left out the Clinton and Bush era (bowing to organizations like Acorn who argued that the bank's standards limiting mortages to people who could afford them discriminated against minorities and prevented them from becoming home owners) pressure on the banks to lower their requirements for granting mortgages. Then the banks sold all these risky mortgage products like adjustable rate mortgages, which the buyers probably didn't understand. The adjustable rate mortgage is not new. My husband and I had one for our first house back in the '80s. It worked out for us because interest rates dropped, enabling us to lock in our rate and shift it to a 30 year fixed rate mortgage. Our original adjustable rate mortgage allowed us to do this. I doubt that the adjustable rate mortgages sold to the poor victims of the propaganda that they should be homeowners even if they can't afford it allowed them to lock in a rate and convert to a 30 year fixed rate mortgage
The federal government couldn't have preempted state laws regulating mortgages because Texas banks did not lower their standards for lending and thus Texas has no forclosure problem..
surprised it was on Jay Leno's show…
I clicked on the link and got a message that Internet Explorer cannot display this webpage. Why?
I see what you're saying however CRA was a disaster but clearly had nothing to do with the crash.
As these points show you could have had 30 CRA's but if you don't have what's listed above there would be no crash regardless of CRA.
You have:
A=CRA
B= wall st recklessness
C= crash
C happens with B alone
A doesn't cause C without B.
So in conclusion B is more responsible then anything else.
Even though CRA losses accounted for very small % of crash losses you'll still stick to that talking point?
If we just had CRA and nothing else then there would've never been the crash. just some small loses and some small bank failures.
You have:
A=CRA
B= wall st recklessness
C= crash
C happens with B alone.
C does not happen with A alone
Interviewer: What will you be tomorrow?
Protester: A goat.
Great video, stan! Sounds like the 3 1/2 days should be either in Minnesota in January, or southern Arizona in August… just to get the full effect.
As the points listed above here point out
No government or acorn like group forced wall st banks to buy up risky securities and leverage their assets 30/1 -40/1 on complete risk with no capital requirements. That was government GETTING OUT of the way that allowed that.
They did this out of trying to make a quick buck and got burned.
None of that wouldve been a major crises if they were not allowed to become TOO BIG TOO FAIL which came from the repeal of regulation.
The solution is to reinstate Glass-Steagall and eliminate the idea of "too big to fail." We don't need thousands of new regulations when only two will do: Screw up and you're on your own. Screw up big enough and you're going to prison.
Easy money from the Fed plus the repeal of Glass-Steagall plus the notion that our government would bail out institutions that were "too big to fail" created a perfect storm of moral hazard.
If you imagine the big banks as a group of alcoholics, the government essentially put a few bottles of whiskey in front of them, told them not to drink it, but said they'd get a ride home or bailed out of jail if they were drunk or got into trouble.
""""Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver or less?"""
Crowd: "MORE!"
WHO SAID IT?
Ronald Raegan
I agree.
I've never heard the Tparty call for bringing back glass steagal. I've heard it said at OWS over and over
Just saying.
There's a reason it's called Zoocommie Park.
"You might be surprised CRA is not one of them."
It should be; the CRA together with the nationalization of our mortgage industry, laid the foundation which caused the rest:
* Pressure on banks to lend to folks with bad credit, lest the government accuse banks of "red-lining", and shut them down
* Ability of banks to lend recklessly, because they could re-sell the mortgages and stick government with the tab
* Creation of arcane derivatives to finance shaky loans by hiding them with good ones
Blaming the financial crash on "greed" is like blaming a plane crash on "gravity".
Ron Paul opposed the repeal of Glass-Steagall because he predicted it would combine with the Fed's loose monetary policy to create a bubble for which taxpayers would be left to foot the bill once it burst. He also predicted the result would be even more regulation for the banking industry, the sector of our economy which is already the most regulated. He's been proven correct.
Interestingly, Canada — which has basically avoided this whole mess — has no equivalent of Glass-Steagall and implemented only a minor stimulus after the crisis hit.
It could be due to the fact that it is at http://city-journal.org. CogWheeler simply had a bad link name. Unfortunately for him, the content is usually cogent and logical, as opposed to the blather originating from the OWS types.
These Occupy Wall Streeters are less than 1/100th of the Population of the USofA but they claim to speak for the 99%? Arrogant Anarchy. They should all be sent to a non-government school and taught history and economics before they're given permission to march again.
we are talking about tax rates or amount of tax. no one is saying that the upper incomers should pay less tax than the bus driver-give me a break the top 1% pay the majority of all income tax now. we are spending 25% of GDP when for the last 60 years we average tax collection at 18-20% of GDP
I do like Ron Paul. His fed op-eds are great reads.
I like all his platforms except for the deregulate deregulate deregulate
Sure, get rid of out-dated regs that serve no function. But Free market isn't going to protect millions from getting ripped off. It will not protect thousands having their drinking water contaminated, Miners from dying, oil rigs from exploding, toxic toys ect ect
in 1997 the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million – while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes – five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. todays GOP is 1% friendly, who cares about the middle class.
Did you factor in 2 billion a week in afghan, Iraq costs and prescription drug program which does NOT allow us to buy drugs from cheaper markers?
And the logic to my providing the site's name…?
Actually, both URLs should work. Gelinas is good. Mike Mayo's (a bank analyst) new book, 'Excile on Wall Street' gets further into what has broken down. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece titled 'Wall Street Can't Handle the Truth', just yesterday. Of course, it was in their Life & Culture section.
So, saying "There's a reason OWS isn't taken seriously anymore" tells me you aren't watching.
There is no direct link between adjustable rate mortgages and any "forced" action by government. Further, the qualifications on a variable rate loan are the same as for a fixed rate loan. All you have to think about to understand this is that the princiapal is the same, either way. No credit analysis, they should lose.
Cool. I hadn't tried the .com version and it works well. Perhaps mew1183 was having some internet routing or DNS isues.
I didn't think I had implied logic behind specification of the name, but reading back perhaps so. I think I missed the "informed" part of the statement. I still disagree with many of the stated OWS goals (from many sources) from an economic basis. I do support their ability to convey their message, though I find their methodology more than slightly strange. Pure democracy simply doesn't seem to work past a certain small number of people and they passed this long ago.
What were the head Honchos at the SEC busy doing in the months and days prior to the crash of 08?
Watching PORN on their Gov. issued, tax payer funded Computers…and charging said PORN as expenses to the Tax PAYERS! (Worse than $16 Dollar cupcakes and $8.25 per cup of Coffee!)
SEC also had "sort of"' audited Bernie Madeoff in the several years prior to his PONZI Scheme Collapse.
(methinks maybe they were playing "footsie" with ole Bernie?) Typical BIG GOV employees doing their most important JOBS! Kinda Like FANNIE and FREDDIE guaranteed Sub Prime Mortgages from the CRA!
B does not happen without A therefore nor does C.
Wall Streets was not reckless, just following orders. The collapse happens at all levels because property valuation at all levels is determined from the bottom up. If you artificially inflate the value of a $100k house to $200k you must expect that inflation to reflect all the way up. That is how you misunderstand the fact that the CRA losses are only a small percentage.
By the way, what is the fixation with "talking points"? Are you a mere sycophant or are you trying to present knowledge that you do not understand.
You aren't too specific, beyond 1st amendment rights, so I'll throw a few things out. The transaction tax, repealed in the 60's, has conceptual appeal. That's easy, and a common OWS suggestion. It would hurt flash trading the most, which I think causes harm anyway. Being more restrictive, or outright banning, derivatives which do not settle in the commodity they base their value upon, is another good idea. But we're already getting abstract. Glass-Steagall was abstract enough for folks, as many are finally coming around to understanding the harm this fundamental conflict of interest can cause.
I don't have an "I'm smarter than you, therefore you are my subject" attitude when it comes to this stuff. Neither do you, I assume, but banks do. It's complex, and leaves me thinking that "Pure democracy" was never about making sure a politician's smarts are no better than the average protester. Once upon a time, this country saw politicians as their agents and trusted that they would advocate for them, even when things got complicated. How times change.
US Fin Reg came before OWS. People have become more motivated by unemployment, as they watch firms like MF Global explode and economic regions like Europe get tied up in fundamental societal problems, made worse by modern finance. If we in the US more fully tried to understand the Amendment to ban CDS swaps, or the one to break up the banks by size, maybe one wouldn't have been "tabled", while the other received a "snap vote". The early death of these Amendments (Dorgan / Brown-Kaufman) kept them from a full debate. I didn't know what a snap-vote was, until I learned that, on Brown-Kaufman, the fear was it might gain traction with the public. So, they sure as hell got it out of the way fast. Its 33 'yes' votes were, no less, a milestone. Without digressing any further, the gauntlet is being thrown to us to get in their ear and wise up.
"●Many states had anti-predatory lending laws on their books (along with lower defaults and foreclosure rates). In 2004, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency federally preempted state laws regulating mortgage credit and national banks. Following this change, national lenders sold increasingly risky loan products in those states. Shortly after, their default and foreclosure rates skyrocketed. "
This is the insidious one, that takes the "town hall" out of America. Big banks cry poor man at being subject to state law, so what do they do? The push their own federal "Mandates", allowing them one-stop lobbiest shopping, to get what they want in Washington. State Attorney Generals will be increasingly powerless, if they have their way.
About 90% of all the loans FNMA and FHLMC had were "conforming", the ones with 20% down or PMI. The last 10%, that came after 2006 was junk, but it was a minority of a, at that point, mature Sub-Prime market being thrown around by private banks, who were mostly exempt from the CRA.
The mortgage servicers need to voluntarily reduce principal based on how underwater the loans are. The housing crisis won't be fixed for years, otherwise. All the programs suck, so far, and they should be sharing this loss.
I keep thinking of Thomas Jefferson calling them out over the "inflate and deflate" technique. We think the banks haven't done these things before.
I think we agree.
"""Wall Streets was not reckless, just following orders"""
There you go again. Another talking point you can't prove just repeat.
If thats true then tell me this:
Who in the government ordered banks to over leverage 30/1 – 40/1 on complete risk with no capital requirements against their will?
Who in the government told the ratings agencies to give AAA ratings to crap securities the big banks were looking to dump on investors while betting against them?
And thats just the tip of the iceberg.
Which government "ORDER" was that?
Great comment
You're making great points all around.
thanks for the insight.
The only reason they weren't leveraged higher is because Wall St didn't completely believe Fannie and Freddie. It's called hedging. It's smart to hedge a bet that just sounds to good to be true.
Apologies for getting back to this exceedingly late and thanks for an excellent reply. My life, or absence thereof, gets somewhat complex from time to time.
Slowing the delta on trades does have an appeal. Automation of trades can overwhelm system with positive feedback.
I would have to agree with the statements involving the ego level amongst many financial types. I have seen anecdotal evidence of this down to a personal level.
Fin Reg has always been a thorny issue for me. There need to be controls to prevent abuses, but they need to be balanced against the general business climate. If we make things too restrictive, capitol will flee for less restrictive zones.
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