[Winstonm]

Truly amazing this guy could get enough votes to beat Romney anywhere.

Quote

"We went into a recession in 2008. People forget why," Rick Santorum told an audience recently. "They thought it was a housing bubble. The housing bubble was caused because of a dramatic spike in energy prices that caused the housing bubble to burst ... People had to pay so much money to air condition and heat their homes or pay for gasoline that they couldn't pay their mortgage."

I bet Santorum and Bachmann go to the same hairdresser.

[PassedOut]

kenberg, on 2012-February-11, 06:33, said:

I had missed this:
http://www.nybooks.c...rd-mitt-romney/

It may be of interest to people like me who lack extensive knowledge of the candidates. The review is hardly the last word, but I thought it a reasonable starting point for thinking about the probable GOP candidate.

I had not seen that either. Thanks for the link.

[cherdano]

Just came across this clip from 4 years ago:
Mitt drops out

[kenberg]

cherdano, on 2012-February-11, 14:36, said:

Just came across this clip from 4 years ago:
Mitt drops out

That's a kick. I still feel the same way about being friended. Apparently my spell-checker also objects to friended.

As an independently minded Democrat, I am dismayed by what is happening in the Republican primaries. Winston's quotes from Santorum about the housing bubble sadden me. Among my friends I find conservative views that I can agree with. These friends and these views are not being represented in the current Republican party. A pity.

[hrothgar]

kenberg, on 2012-February-11, 16:52, said:

Winston's quotes from Santorum about the housing bubble sadden me. Among my friends I find conservative views that I can agree with. These friends and these views are not being represented in the current Republican party. A pity.

I disagree with Santorum on most everything. However, he could very well be right on the housing bubble.

Its difficult to prove precisely why the bubble popped, however, prolonged changes in fuel costs are often cited as the proximate cause.

[kenberg]

Well, Santorum's quotes seem to vary between the cause of the bubble and the cause of the collapse, but I suppose he means the collapse. Let's assume so.

I was moving just before the collapse. The market price of my house had gone up dramatically in the year or two before I moved. No profit there as I was selling one, buying another. It required no great economic expertise to know that such extreme change was being driven by speculation. Not necessarily professional speculators but by the widespread belief that whatever the price was then it would be higher, much higher, later. So everyone wanted in. Maybe energy costs acted in some way as a trigger but it is my very strong view that the collapse was inevitable. I backed this view by telling the realtor handling the house I was selling that while I wanted a good price I mostly wanted it sold before the (imo certain) collapse. I suppose if I really wanted to back my views I would have just sold, not bought, stored the furniture and toured Europe for a while, then returned and bought cheap.

In my view, the stupidity shown by the professionals as enablers in this matter is inexcusable. Of course the really savvy ones, as we now know, constructed the mortgages, bundled them, and dumped them. Clever them.

Added: "True Lies" is one of those fun movies I am happy to see more than once. There is a scene in which the bad guys are in a truck teetering on the edge of a drop. The truck stabilizes, there is relief on the faces of the occupants, and then a pelican settles on the hood and down the truck goes. If one's truck is in such a position, one should not blame the pelican for the results.

A non-ideological analysis, meaning that the true believers on both the left and the right are sent packing, would be very useful. But I think the willful ignoring of facts in front of one's face will be a big part of the explanation.

[Winstonm]

hrothgar, on 2012-February-11, 17:05, said:

I disagree with Santorum on most everything. However, he could very well be right on the housing bubble.

Its difficult to prove precisely why the bubble popped, however, prolonged changes in fuel costs are often cited as the proximate cause.

There were many factors affecting the housing boom and bust - and the subsequent credit boom and bust - and to latch onto one minor contributor in order to protect ideology from blame is disingenuous. But that is the right wing lament - The Big Lie that is told over and over until it becomes the truth.

If any one driver could be found (it can't), it would be the scramble for yield brought about by Greenspan's Fed dropping interest rates to 1% and then holding them at too low of levels for too long. Add to that the Federeal Reserve ignoring its responsibility to regulate non-bank mortgage lenders and the advent of computer loan approvals, and the fuse of the bomb was lit.

Oil prices had nothing to do with LTV ratios that were unrealistic, nothing to do with "no doc" loans, nothing to do with no down loans, and nothing to do with NINJA loans. The mad rush was to create mortgages, bundle them into RMBS, and then sell them to Wall Street banks, who had coerced the Fed (again) into allowing them to ignore historical risk-taking limits.

The best that can be said for the oil shock is that it was a contributing cause that created a faster slide.

[jdeegan]

Santorum looks like a pathetic wuss on TV. His out-to-lunch comment about the housing bubble is no better. A serious presidential candidate ought to be able to mouth some halfway plausible comment about that subject. It looks like Romney versus Obama in November.

[Winstonm]

Santorum was part right. Short article from the Atlantic which has a chart of home prices compared to gasolone prices. Is that a correlation between gas prices and home prices or is it coincidental?

[blackshoe]

It may be that the correlation is coincidental.

[jdeegan]

The spike in oil prices probably pricked the bubble. The bubble itself was created by the securitization of mortgages done in a reckless and improper fashion. The rating agencies failed to provide appropriate due diligence. Fannie and Freddie had their heads up their ass. Everyone else was groping in the dark since securitizing mortgages was brand new at the time.

[kenberg]

Just to add slightly to the above (which I completely agree with). It depends on where Santorum is going with his assertion. Richard refers to the "proximate cause". The adjective is important. Of course the badly written mortgages were not the proximate cause, the time interval is too long. But if Fannie, Freddie, and the rest had not mucked it all up, we could have ridden out the price spike and the economic downturn. If Santorum wants us all to conclude that the crash was really not due to any screw-ups or scams, just one of those unforeseeable bumps in the road, I think he needs to reconsider.

[jdeegan]

kenberg, on 2012-February-13, 07:04, said:

Just to add slightly to the above (which I completely agree with). It depends on where Santorum is going with his assertion. Richard refers to the "proximate cause". The adjective is important. Of course the badly written mortgages were not the proximate cause, the time interval is too long. But if Fannie, Freddie, and the rest had not mucked it all up, we could have ridden out the price spike and the economic downturn. If Santorum wants us all to conclude that the crash was really not due to any screw-ups or scams, just one of those unforeseeable bumps in the road, I think he needs to reconsider.

Let me offer a kinder, gentler view of the mortgage crisis. I have some professional competence in this area having been tasked by Bank of America in the late 1990's to look in to the risks of securitization which had been working fine with credit card receivables for a number of years. Everyone wanted to expand the process to other markets. Indeed, imho slicing and dicing pools of loans into tranches and reselling the pieces at retail in a form that people want is ultimately a step forward for mankind.

The problem is that there is no laboratory where this can be tested except for the real world. Man did not tame fire without getting burned. The Dutch tulip bubble ended badly. The South Sea Bubble was a disaster. I could go on and on. My personal experience at BOA involved a post-mortem of the subprime auto loan debacle. The 'geniuses' on Wall Street were treating them exactly like credit card receivables when, in fact, the pattern of defaults was entirely different. Within a fairly short time everyone involved went broke.

Mortgages are far more complex instruments than credit card receivables and a much larger market, so the potential for trouble was enormous. I still blame the rating agencies and Freddie/Fannie, but human shortcomings and folly are, in part, what life is all about. To the extent all this becomes an issue in the presidential campaign, it is a big plus for Romney, esp. in the general election.

[kenberg]

jdeegan, on 2012-February-13, 16:35, said:

having been tasked by Bank of America in the late 1990's to look in to the risks of securitization which had been working fine with credit card receivables for a number of years.

Working fine for whom? The credit card folks have managed to create a social norm of debt, with large numbers of people making large interest payments monthly. The tank is working fine for the piranhas, but maybe not so well for the guppies.

[y66]

No doubt the spike in oil prices were the last straw for that Mexican strawberry picker in Bakersfield, California with the $14,000 income and the $720,000 mortgage.

[jdeegan]

y66, on 2012-February-13, 21:57, said:

No doubt the spike in oil prices were the last straw for that Mexican strawberry picker in Bakersfield, California with the $14,000 income and the $720,000 mortgage.

I stand corrected. The crisis for the NINJA mortgages was triggered mostly by payment resetting. The subsequent crisis, no doubt, impacted oil prices more than the spike in oil prices impacted mortgages. The temporal correlation says nothing about causality.

[jdeegan]

kenberg, on 2012-February-13, 17:50, said:

Working fine for whom? The credit card folks have managed to create a social norm of debt, with large numbers of people making large interest payments monthly. The tank is working fine for the piranhas, but maybe not so well for the guppies.

The guppies are learning fast about credit cards. Soon, they will learn a similar lesson about student loans.

[Winstonm]

What the Republicans won't tell you....

Quote

"the survey found Americans unconvinced that safety-net programs represent a major source of the deficit problem. When asked to identify the biggest reason the federal government faces large deficits for the coming years, just 3 percent of those surveyed said it was because of “too much government spending on programs for the elderly”; only 14 percent said the principal reason was “too much government spending on programs for poor people.” Those explanations were dwarfed by the 24 percent who attributed the deficits primarily to excessive defense spending, and the 46 percent plurality who said their principal cause was that “wealthy Americans don’t pay enough in taxes.”

[blackshoe]

Which simply shows that most Americans are ignorant, uniformed, and/or stupid.

[Winstonm]

blackshoe, on 2012-February-17, 00:12, said:

Which simply shows that most Americans are ignorant, uniformed, and/or stupid.

It is ignorant, uniformed, or stupid to place a higher value on social issues than on war? Gee, I didn't know that. But at least I know that John Galt was a fictional character.