"You read that right -- the events of the past year are not a mere accident, but are the results of a conscious and willful SEC decision to allow these firms to legally violate existing net capital rules that, in the past 30 years, had limited broker dealers debt-to-net capital ratio to 12-to-1. Instead, the 2004 exemption -- given only to 5 firms -- allowed them to lever up 30 and even 40 to 1. Who were the five that received this special exemption? You won't be surprised to learn that they were Goldman, Merrill, Lehman, Bear Stearns, and Morgan Stanley. The Securities and Exchange Commission can blame itself for the current crisis. That is the allegation being made by a former SEC official, Lee Pickard, who says a rule change in 2004 led to the failure of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch. The SEC allowed five firms â the three that have collapsed plus Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley â to more than double the leverage they were allowed to keep on their balance sheets and remove discounts that had been applied to the assets they had been required to keep to protect them from defaults. Making matters worse, according to Mr. Pickard, who helped write the original rule in 1975 as director of the SEC's trading and markets division, is a move by the SEC this month to further erode the restraints on surviving broker-dealers by withdrawing requirements that they maintain a certain level of rating from the ratings agencies. "They constructed a mechanism that simply didn't work," Mr. Pickard said. "The proof is in the pudding â three of the five broker-dealers have blown up." The so-called net capital rule was created in 1975 to allow the SEC to oversee broker-dealers, or companies that trade securities for customers as well as their own accounts. It requires that firms value all of their tradable assets at market prices, and then it applies a haircut, or a discount, to account for the assets' market risk. So equities, for example, have a haircut of 15%, while a 30-year Treasury bill, because it is less risky, has a 6% haircut. The net capital rule also requires that broker dealers limit their debt-to-net capital ratio to 12-to-1, although they must issue an early warning if they begin approaching this limit, and are forced to stop trading if they exceed it, so broker dealers often keep their debt-to-net capital ratios much lower. Chalk up another win for excess deregulation . . ." http://www.nysun.com/business/ex-sec-official-blames-agency-for-blow-up/86130/
I was paraphrasing the Republican position, and I agree with you, of course. "Support the troops" seems to mean leave them there indefinitely and minimize the importance of not just their deaths, but their living conditions.
Ohh, some morons played the Hitler card... again... Nazis believed that people are children of nature, not God, that rights emanate from the state, not God, that children belonged to the state, not their parents, internally they were socialists and externally anti communists, they won the political debate by shutting down the opposition, and they used the state schools to indoctrinate children into their world view... there is a perfect alignment with the Democratic party!! If you are too fricking stupid to see that you are too fricking stupid to argue politics and likely you will become a world class loser...
I look at it this way. Bush: +1 million killed in Iraq. Hitler: +5 million Jews killed in WWII. Bush= 1/5 Hitler. Now let's cancel this election and see how far this puppy can go.
Did you know that most dust in a home, and most dust in a pillow is actually made up of millions upon millions of skin babies?
actually if you slowed down for a minute and stopped foaming at the mouth. You find the Nazi description fits the neco-cons to a tee. Their concept of birth at ejaculation and forced pregnancies mandated by the state ......... is only the beginning. But, being the ideological half-witted imbecile, your conclusions automatically terminate at anybody , but your self.
Don't worry about Mercor... He's a dying breed -- not going to make it in the modern evolutionary synthesis - getting further evolved with systems science. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolutionary_synthesis Mercor's views take no part of the future - futurology. He will be sidelined with history, and is just fighting for his little speck in it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurology We are evolving - he is going extinct with his Neocon brethren and other elitist managerial thinkers. You just can't fight nature - no matter how much you try to cut it down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism With systems thinking - we are getting rid of the cancerous growth from within - ideology alignment of elitist spinners filling our lives with useless information and sugar to keep manufacturing for them. A free democracy and pure Laissez-faire capitalism - free of corruption... that is the way we are evolving through this crisis THEY brought on us by their cancerous nature. And separate systems with clean trustworthy interaction to the social economy systems. It IS a mixed economy of sorts after all - and everything is interconnected - just get the system right. Sustainable development - that means sustainable growth - thinking Ecosystems and whole systems instead of isolating elitist views. Integrity and trust - that means freedom to grow and interact.