Cheney says "No one was smart enough to figure it out"

reply to post by interestedalways


Ok heres the thing

After the manure hit the Air Movement Device.....
The public found out how these companies were allowed to operate.
Governemts surely must have known what was inevitable, even
I can see that and I'm a Dumb-Ass.

After all, it is the government that makes the rules by which
everybody follows, is it not.

Originally posted by noonebutme
Of course they did. Many people knew and forecast it - it's been on various news and financial sites for ages (read : years).

And no, the economic crisis wasn't some "planned" conspiracy theory -- it was down to sheer greed -- those being rewarded and getting huge bonuses for risk-taking. That's a very high level view of course. It gets much more complicated.

But there's no alien influence, no Illuminaughties or NWO (weren't they a rap group?).

It was silly, greedy people.



[edit on 9-1-2009 by noonebutme]

Exactly. We were forced by law to make loans to people that did not qualify by normal statndards (Community Reinvestment Act). This was expanded to a variety of no equity and even negative equity loans that were justified by exorbitant interest rates. Nobody ever expected these loans the be repaid. When the mortgage market collapsed, the mortgage backed securites became worthless and the banks began to fail. Then the credit dried up, so other businesses begane to fail. The only people that made out like bandits in all this were the sub-prime mortgage brokers who loaded up fees on these stupid people that were taking out loans they couldn't afford.

So, yes, it was greed.

reply to post by interestedalways


Not to defend Cheney, but this sounds like a quote out of context, perhaps: nobody was smart enough to figure out how to fix the economy.

Originally posted by sensfan
Here's a theory I have been thinking of, but it may be a little far fetched, but then again.

Do you suppose that the Republicans realized some time ago (over 2 years ago) how they were going to lost all power in washington, so screwed the country over big time...and I mean to an extent that there is no way a new President, or powerful congress (Democrats) could fix it in 4 years.....hence, the republicans can come back in 4 years and say "well, they had 4 years, and couldn't fix it, so now give us a shot".

Wouldn't surprise me.

It is naive to think that one party is inherently evil and the other is inherently good.

The President doesn't have a magical Good Economy/Bad Economy switch. What screwed us over was dumb mistakes and short-sighted legislation by our elected idiots. Also, "screwing over" a country as powerful as ours takes a long time and indeed this has been a long time coming.

I will remind you that the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (Banking Act of 1933) was repealed in 1999 in a bi-partisan effort by the Republican legislature and Democrat executive. That act separated loan banks from investment banks. Repealing it caused a wave of mergers and the formation of mega-banks which were vulnerable to collapse due to their interdependent, interconnected departments.

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 was signed by Jimmy Carter (Democrat) after being passed by a Democrat-control Congress. This forced banks to assume additional risk that slowly chipped away at the stability and sustainability of the housing market.

After the stock market slump caused by 9/11 it was largely the Bush tax cuts which helped the market rally. Of course, as we have seen, other factors caused the economy to fold like a house of cards.

My point is that it is naive to blame a political party for the current problems. There's plenty of blame to go around. To me it seems that our elected officials forget why certain laws were enacted in the first place, and don't think more than a few years ahead on the ramifications of the new laws they create. They've created a massive Web of Law that is unmanageable and the politicians themselves don't even understand it; it is just too big and tangled.

As far as "no one seeing it coming", Dick:
Three years ago, Senator Chuck Hagel from Nebraska was warning anyone who would listen about Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
At that time, I had an acquaintance who owned some car dealerships.
Overnight, this person got into the mortgage business. He showed me loan apps that were approved...for people who had credit reports that were horrifying. People who defaulted on everything they ever took loans on. People that had NO PROOF of income. The person would simply "state" that they were making a certain amount of money, and they'd get approved. The mortgage companies were actually using quotes by Barney Frank about how "everyone has the right to own a home"

It took Hagel nearly 2 years to get enough support, and he wrote the bill which would have required some actual regulation on Fannie Mae\Freddie Mac.
When the bill went 'full senate', it was killed. Now it's public knowledge how many bribes were doled out.

As for the two idiots running in the last election, when confronted about Hagel's bill, McCain tried to take credit for it, and Obama said “two years ago I said that we’ve got a subprime lending crisis that has to be dealt with. I wrote to Secretary Paulson".
Wow...he wrote a letter!

Originally posted by Lazyninja
reply to post by interestedalways

 

Not to defend Cheney, but this sounds like a quote out of context, perhaps: nobody was smart enough to figure out how to fix the economy.

We have oversight committees in the House and the Senate who's JOBS are to know and police this stuff. They fired the guy that ran Fannie Mae because he was cooking the books (he's now an Obama economic advisor). Fannie Mae was a huge contibutor to Barney Frank's campaign. Barney Frank ran the committee that should have known it was happening.

Then, Bush comes out with this genius idea to write $700 billion in blank checks with little or no oversight or accountability. Good Lord.

The problem is/was that the money was too good to pass up and they just hoped it would just all work out.

reply to post by Lazyninja


If you read Cheney's quotes, he says "no one saw it coming", like
it just happened out of the blue. No warning. Big surprise.

reply to post by Alxandro


Except the numerous amounts of economic experts that did try to warn them about what was about to happen. Not to mention Ron Paul in the congress before he attempted to run for president and even while he was running for president. It doesn't take a genius to see a bubble in the economy. Obviously what happens when you start handing out credit to people who can't afford it......and your telling me you didn't see this coming? Seriously? Oh and don't forget the fact were printing money with absolutely no real way of paying it back putting our government further into debt and making the value of the dollar worth less therefore making costs of everything go up. Any deflation that occurs in the market over a short period of time is not really a deflation but more of a hoax to make it appear as if there is so the people will spend spend spend. Anything to keep the wall street stocks up. Our government has evaded the limitations restrained on them by our U.S. Constitution so many times its absurd and we the people are honestly to blame for putting up with it. I for one can't wait for the day a revolution occurs because I will be on the front lines to take back this country and return it to who it really belongs to, the people.

Originally posted by Alxandro
Well I'm sure no one is happy about the economic crisis but he may have a point.
Not one economic expert, anywhere, saw this coming.

Really? Is that so? What about Peter Schiff? He was talking about it all years before it happened. SO I think it is safe to say someone saw it coming.

Can somebody please pop a bullet through this man's head (and bush's for that matter) and rid US of further suffering? I'm honestly dead tired of this BS!!!! Time for talks are over, I want to see heads roll, I want to see blood spilled!

I'm sorry, I normally can be a very calm person, not wishing any ill on anybody. But this takes the cake! I'm up to here with them... BOTH parties!

Something that eveyone should understand about politics and politicians. The politicians think that everyone, except other politicians, are a bunch of idiots or worse yet braindead zombies who will do whatever they're told.

If you view politics with this in mind then you gain a bit of understanding about the behavior of politicians. So when Dick Cheney says, "nobody was able to figure it out." He was refering to the public and not the politicians, they all knew what they were doing. Republicans and Democrats are to blame here.

I am a Republican but I am not happy about the current situation in DC. Politicians who knew better got on the free credit bandwagon and the spend until we win BS. Since I am not an idiot, and since I have had basic economics, I am not fooled into thinking that the economy just blew up without any warning. The signs have been there for years, hell for decades. Ross Perot (remember him) talked about it in 1992.

The problem is that the media serves us pablum and gruel and keeps any real meat out of sight. They also think that we are a nation of morons, they think this because we keep coming back for more pablum. When there is a real issue, they do a lackluster job (read that as half-assed) of reporting on it. They allow it to run through a normal cycle (about 24 hours) and then they drop it. Then they will cover it all up and even deny that the story was ever run.

Something that eveyone should understand about politics and politicians. The politicians think that everyone, except other politicians, are a bunch of idiots or worse yet braindead zombies who will do whatever they're told.

If you view politics with this in mind then you gain a bit of understanding about the behavior of politicians. So when Dick Cheney says, "nobody was able to figure it out." He was refering to the public and not the politicians, they all knew what they were doing. Republicans and Democrats are to blame here.

I am a Republican but I am not happy about the current situation in DC. Politicians who knew better got on the free credit bandwagon and the spend until we win BS. Since I am not an idiot, and since I have had basic economics, I am not fooled into thinking that the economy just blew up without any warning. The signs have been there for years, hell for decades. Ross Perot (remember him) talked about it in 1992.

The problem is that the media serves us pablum and gruel and keeps any real meat out of sight. They also think that we are a nation of morons, they think this because we keep coming back for more pablum. When there is a real issue, they do a lackluster job (read that as half-assed) of reporting on it. They allow it to run through a normal cycle (about 24 hours) and then they drop it. Then they will cover it all up and even deny that the story was ever run.

Originally posted by TasteTheMagick
Yeah: "No one anywhere was smart enough to figure it out. Now that you're all royally screwed beyond repair I can just come out and say it because there's nothing you can do to stop it. *wink*"

(insert expletives here)

yeah it's all said and done.
the beginning damage has been done and there's MORE where it came from.
now let me fly off to Dubai and enjoy the new ISLAND that was built there.
Lord Retirements tough these days aint it???

Well the quote is straight from the Condoleeza Rice/W playbook:

"No one would ever have thought that they'd use airliners as weapons," even though the Pentagon had practised wargames of just such attacks on themselves and on the WTC.

Cheney and BusshCo are so disdainful of our intelligence that they insult it in a thousand small ways daily. A whopper like this they only issue once a month.

reply to post by fnIrish


Actually, I think that there is something more to it. Since this is a conspiracy website, I'll just go ahead and go there.

Washington DC is not really run by the politicians. It's run by bureaucrats. Sure the politicians are the bosses on paper, but they are more or less figureheads. They come and go. The people who do not come and go are the career bureaucrats. They pass the info up to the politicians that they want to hear, and then they pass the real stuff down to their staffs. There have been many books written on this sort of thing.

It's like a big corporation, the CEO does not "run" the company, the people who work for him do. The CEO is a figurehead, he puts a face on the company. Sure he has input into the basic direction of the company, but without his managers carrying out his orders, he can do nothing.

So what does all this have to do with the current situation? Well, the one thing that does controll the bureaucrats is the budget. They can't do anything without money. The budget is limited by politics and revenue. Most of the revenue comes from taxes (corporate and individual).

Let's say that you are a bureaucrat and you would really like to expand the roll of government. You would be limited in what you do by the amount of money in the budget. It is hard to increase the budget by a large amount because of the difficulty in raising taxes. There is a limit to how much money can be generated by taxes of any kind. Econ 101 stuff.

So the Federal Budget is around 2.5 trillion dollars and it would be hard to get much more than that. Still harder to sustain that level of spending for long.

So what if the bureaucrats recognized that the US economy is a much larger source of money? Right now the US GDP is around 14 trillion dollars and something like 40 trillion flows through US banks per year. That is a much larger pool of cash and the potential is virtually unlimited. What if the bureaucrats decided to tap into the economics of the US?

How would that be done? How could you get the politicians to go along with it? How would you sell it to the public?

Well, first of all in order to control the entire US economy, some changes would have to be made to our economic structure. We are (or were) a Capitalist society with a liase-fare economy. Individuals and corporations own the means of production through stock shares.

In order for the government to control the economy, the government would have to take ownership of a large portion of the means of production. This would essentially change the country into a Socialist state. How would that happen?

There would have to be some sort of event, or series of events, that prompted individuals and corporations to dispose of their stock shares.

Something like a large stock market crash (downturn). Something that would cause stocks to become worthless, or too risky to hold onto. This would prompt many people to sell their shares, even at a loss.

A stock market crash by itself would not be enough howerver. To make people and corporations. Something that makes investors very nervous is a large amount of volatility, large swings up and down. An unpredictable stock market is kind of like owning an unpredictable pitbull. People with stocks may hold them during a downturn, but if there is a sudden unexplained jump upwards, many investors will sell on the upside. This rollercoaster ride is exactly what we are seeing in the stockmarket.

Still, that would not be enough to seize control of the economy. What is needed is some economic tsunami that will have people begging for the government to step in. After all who could blame the government for coming to the rescue?

What if there was a banking meltdown, right in the middle of the stock market crash? Almost all of the money supply in the US flows through banks. What if there was a sudden credit crisis and corporations couldn't get loans, while their stocks were crashing? That could cause a panic. Corporations desperate to save money would start laying off workers, selling assets, selling stocks. An entity with money could walk in and buy everything cheap.

This is exactly the scenario that we are seeing. The Federal Reserve Bank, loaned "someone" 2 trillion dollars back in July. They won't disclose who that someone was, but suddenly the US Govt. is awash in cash to the tune of 2 trillion dollars. The 2 trillion dollars serves two purposes, it puts cash in the hands of Washington that they can use to buy, and it dries up the money supply available to banks.

So, this created the "credit crisis" for the banks. If the banks can't get money to loan, then they cannot make loans to the corporations who need it. The corporations can't get money and so they panic, and start laying off people, cutting back, etc. Later the corporations start begging for Washington to help them.

Now in steps Washington with a fist full of Federal Reserve cash. They are able to "bailout" some of the banks, in return for a controlling interest in those banks. So, they go right for the biggest banks, knowing that the banks will use the cash to buy smaller banks, but now Washington conrols the big bank, so they gain control of the smaller banks too.

Next, Washington buys some of the larger investment companies and insurance companies. They get to pick and choose which ones they want, since everyone is hurting and hoping that they get bought. So, with a controlling interest in the major investment organizations in the country, the government gains controll over most major stock holdings.

Then, the corporations who are most vulnerable start asking for a similar buyout, errr, I mean bailout. Yeah, it's a bailout not a buyout, sure sure.

So, the government is only too happy to step in and bailout these major corporations, for a price, a controlling interest in the corporation.

There you have it, almost overnight the US Government gains a controlling interest in the majority of the US Economy and we go from a Capitalist society to a Socialist one.

Then the pols, go on television and say that, "Nobody saw this coming. What could we do? We had to act. Etc. Etc."

The truth is that it was all planned. The dominos were all very carefully lined up. Then when it was ready, all they needed was a little push. The push came, when the government borrowed 2 tril.

reply to post by Alxandro

Originally posted by Alxandro
Well I'm sure no one is happy about the economic crisis but he may have a point.
Not one economic expert, anywhere, saw this coming.

Peter Schiff saw it coming but only got snickered and laughed at.

reply to post by Alxandro


I'm no economist but I saw this coming for years. And there were numerous economist who warned--and sometimes screamed--that this was going to happen. It was, in fact, obvious.

mid evil 'eye for an eye' mentality wasn't such a bad thing i'm starting to believe.

My point is that our 'government' is not really very smart, and not very efficient at anything. We do best when Dummycrats and Rebumblicans each hold part of the Congress/White House, so they end up not doing anything/ no damage.
What I find incredible is that NOONE is talking about the counterfeiting of TRILLIONS of dollars by the banksters, or the almost 600 Trillion phantom economy currently evaporating thru their unethical and illegal 'derivatives' and 'swaps'. Nor is anyone complaining about the government being 'bribed' thru PACs and cush jobs waiting when they want to 'retire', to allow this robbery. Of the People, By the People, and Against the People. Our government has US as the least of their interests! And the judges/lawyers are the MOST corrupt. That is saying a lot. When will it end? In 2015, on the Feast of Trumpets, I hope.