http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444184704577588872840133362.html

regulations are far worse for business than straight taxation. this is the reason most of us fear and despise big government. we want more cops, teachers, firefighters, far fewer deputy assistant superindenents of sustainability, diversity consultants, advisory boards, etc

Amen.

Alternative to regulation is even worse. We had 2009 financial collapse, you want MORE of that but now with radioactive dumps in your backyard and toxic chemicals in the baby formula?

Regulation might be bad for business, but lack of regulation is bad for everyone else.

Regulation is what caused the financial crisis. Forcing banks to give loans to people who demonstrably will not be able to pay them back is a large part of what lead to this debacle. Obviously unscrupulous people took advantage of that to make more money for themselves, but its still the regulation that provided that avenue.

Repackaging bad loans and selling them to unaware investors is what caused this financial crisis. There wasn't enough oversight and not enough regulation in this area.

Claiming that mandate to sell more homes was the sole reason that caused the collapse is revisionism and outright untrue.

Most NINJA variable loans were made not because government forced them to happen, but because there was a demand for them.

Regulations are damaging without any ensured gains so long as corrupt, ethics-violating politicians like Charlie Rangel rotate in/out as chairs of the regulation & oversight committees.

Who establishes and overseas these regulations? The very same people who make exceptions and oversights to the highest bidding lobbyist of the hour. (Both parties are included in this rant.)

Sinij: you twist your counter-argument into stating that the housing crisis was not the sole reason for the collapse; this may be true, but Kaotic stated it was "a large part," not the "sole reason." And he's correct: shady characters like Barney Frank and shady idiots like Nancy Pelosi (one of my local representatives I'm sad, and deeply embarrassed to admit) played their political games, and forced banks to deal in risky loans which DID in large part contribute to the collapse.

Now I remember why I generally avoid this section of the forums. ;P I need to back away once more before you guys pull me back into political debates.

Weeeee!

so banks made risky loans which came back to bite them on the ass so they fucked over everyone they could and scared congress into bailing them out and now they are sitting on piles of taxpayer money and holding houses off the market to try to keep their values up but its not working and the people who got fucked were the taxpayers since no one had to put any money down and the investors got their money and the banks got thiers and the people who got thrown out of their houses just went back to renting.

yes yes, but the article discusses how big business desires regulation- i would agrue that a bailout is a type of price-floor and hence regulation- and benefits from it, because regulation strangles competitors in their proverbial cribs.

fuck the banks, lets talk about a normal person opening a restaurant or plumbing business

This is not what I said.

What I said is that bad loans that were repackaged and sold as a safe investment securities and ultimately resulted in a financial collapse and recession were mostly made because there was a demand for them. Sure, a small portion of them were due to bad "mandatory" regulation aimed at expanding home ownership. Most of them, and the worst excesses of that system, were caused by DEMAND FOR REPACKAGED SECURITIES. Nobody understood what these securities were and regulators did not step in and said, "wait a second, these are not AAA assets!". So a whole bunch of bankers made BILLIONS selling risky junk bonds as a ultra-secure assets.

That is the root cause of recession.

Worst thing, since it wasn't illegal (no regulation!) nobody even went to jail over it.

You're asserting that since the regulators didn't do their jobs we need more regulators?

That is exactly what he is saying. Intentionally misrepresenting an investment is fraud.

The various govt entities already had the power to put a stop to it, but did not.

The Obama administration has decided not to prosecute anyone politically connected in connection with the collapse. However, the Obama allies have this daydream that if only "more" regulations were in place, that the govt would somehow not only detect but have the political will to halt the next big scheme concocted by super wealthy super connected Wall St types.

The irony of course is that the same types who masterminded this whole situation arent much bothered by additional regulation - their legions of lawyers lobbyists and fixers make an extremely good living navigating the legal and regulatory waters. Its the smaller "not too big to fail" entities in the industry that really get hammered.

Here is an example to help you demonstrate my point.

Lets say we have a self-regulating "games for kids" lobby. It is bunch of gaming companies getting together and setting rules for making "games for kids". Few large companies get disproportionally large influence on this regulation.

Now these large companies turn around and stick bunch of addictive gambling into these games under disguise of micro-transactions and get rich off it.

Can you sue them? Not if they control self-regulatory body, they write their own "rules". Unless government steps in and make such practice illegal, they can continue doing it.

Kind of the same thing happened with these derivative securities - they were new enough that there wasn't any regulation in place, aside of self-regulation that was deliberately defanged by involved parties.

You are really mistaken in assuming that corporations would ever act in responsible manner unless they absolutely have to. Less regulations always means less responsiblitiy and this is exactly why shady corporations (see Koch Brothers) love to bankroll "deregulation" astroturfing.

There is no reason derivatives should be illegal. What happened was, sub-prime mortgages, aka mortgages to people who couldnt afford to pay them were packed into securities that *were labelled as AAA* by the rating agencies. In other words, those securities based on sub-prime US borrowers got a higher credit rating that *most first world governments*.

In other words, it was *fraud*.

Securitizing an investment and selling shares shouldn't be illegal. Misrepresenting those securities as something they are not however, has been illegal for a long long time.

If those securities had gotten the DDD rating they deserved, the market would never have picked them up.

In actuality the nuances get a bit deeper as to the hows and whys it happened... and the role a few corrupt people at Freddie and Fannie played in underwriting large segments of subprimes, thereby giving the impression that they were govt-back (which was partially the reason for the AAA credit rating) and many many other aspects have not been covered.

If someone wants to propose, individually, a single regulation or law along with method of enforcement... then sure, individual proposals can be evaluated on their own merit.

But adding regulation willy-nilly usually has unintended consequences.

It wasn't fraud according to the letter of the law. Why? Because there is no regulation/oversight into generating bond ratings, so they can just shrug and say "we tried our best" and move on. AFAIK, you STILL can label junk bonds AAA all day long and not go to jail over it.

System is suppose to be operating on reputation - you label things accurately, because your company's reputation is on the line, but it all fails when massive collusion happens and every rating agency/firm does it.

Read following on Slashdot:



Clearly, we need to deregulate even more, because otherwise we might be in danger of treating employees in humane ways.

Google’s restricting of anti-Muslim video shows role of Web firms as free-speech arbiters.

More reasons we are over-regulated! Who needs free-speech, after all private corporations control nearly all communication medium these days, lets just trust them to do the right thing and respect our rights?

Google servers are privately owned. They can show or not show what they want.

I hope you are not seriously thinking that more random regulation will somehow protect free speech... if anything the opposite occurs.

If you ever actually argued for some sensible regulation, you might get somewhere. Arguing the general principle of giving unaccountable bureaucrats more ways to target us and destroy our businesses so they can justify even larger budgets for themselves will never get you very far with rational people.

So what happens when medium for all speech is privately owned? We just give up on free speech?

Obviously, I disagree with you. Internet was built with government subsidies, many technologies used in Google (including ranking) are/were developed while doing government-sponsored research.

We urgently need regulation/laws that equivalent for Internet neutrality but only for speech.

What do you mean speech neutrality laws?

That sounds pretty damn scary to be honest.

And if you bought into Net Nuetrality- (which was just an underhanded power play for the ultra-large players to use govt as a means to squash their smaller competitors )- then your whole image as a progressive is at stake..

Also... methods of propagating speech have pretty much always been mostly privately owned... in a society where the govt isnt clamping down on speech, the free market does just fine.

Seriously, its within the means of even poor people in the USA to set up a website and stream their own video. Shitty films intended to piss people can be made and aired to your hearts content, even if Big Brother isnt standing over Googles shoulder making them waste bandwidth on it.

I 100% support Net Neutrality and I am surprised you haven't considered what the alternative would look like.

What do I mean? Well consider that most of communications, including political speech, is done online. Accessed via information aggregators like google, tweeter, facebook and so on. All of these are private companies. Under existing laws nothing stopping them from squashing and and all speech they don't like. Just because they rarely do it now, doesn't mean they won't abuse it at some point in the future.


Example: All major search engines (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google) get together and decide they don't like Republican party. All mentions and references of GOP disappear from any and all searches. Such move won't be illegal under current set of laws, because they are private companies.

I would do to Google the same as what I did with Yahoo when it would not let me look my free transgender, cross dressing pron. I dropped them, started useing google. When google starts to keep me from looking for what I want, I go to the next website that won't block it. The same applies to any other type of searching I do. This opens it up where comptetion within the market keeps it open.

I know what the alternative looks like... it looks like the internet that currently exists where less than 50$ can rent me a server to stream whatever I want.

It looks like the current internet where I pay $75 or so a month for 30+ real Mbps down and 5 up... where my latency to most game servers is under 40ms.

As opposed to the Net Nuetrality world where online FPS gaming would all but cease to exist because the govt outlawed network prioritization except for lawfully approved uses like medical videoconferencing because it would be "favoritism".

Yeah.. Twitter and co *could* get together anddecide to censor whatever they want. And you know what happens in a free market when a communication provider/web portal/search engine decides to start providing sub-par results? Other people take the invitation to open competing businesses.

The internet has worked precisely because it hasnt been regulated to death. Not that the govt hasnt meddled in some areas.

But in many respects we have already seen what you describe - major media deciding they dont like one political platform or another. So we get sites like The Blaze, Drudge Report, Salon, etc,etc.

/boggle

Start a new thread, lets talk about Net Neutrality.

If you really want to. I actually read the white papers on it and the proposals.... it honestly pisses me off, unlike most topics I randomly digress on.

Basically it boiled down to a scheme hatched by Google and Friends to use the govt to strongarm ISPs into giving them unfettered license to shovel out as much shit as possible in a price controlled environment.

Controlled prices for Google and the content providers that is, not for the consumers who buy ISP access.

And yes, in the actual proposals prioritizing type of data is outlawed in many scenarios.

Obviously the pro-net neutrality op/eds did not bother to focus on this aspect. They simply blew a lot of bullshit.

Oh, and Fuck Google.

Sure, fuck Google, but not for the reasons of Net Neutrality. I really like to hear your POV on it, so please start a new thread.

in a free market, if all the media providers decided to outlaw the republican party, some other media would appear. this is because there is a market for the republican brand. this has already happened. when conservatives were pushed out of tv and the newspapers, talk radio exploded. when the internet came into wide usage, conservatives leapt at it. now they are taking over twitter. wheres the liberal twitchy.com? doesnt exist, because libs dont need it. they have the magazines, the tv, the newspapers.

net neutrality is much more worrysome. imagine if some bureaucrat decides all talk of illegal immigrants is racist, thus hate speech, thus banned?

all that discourse would vanish, and since the govt would control the internet, we would be like pirate radio or something, always on the run from the man.