http://newleft.tumblr.com/post/562078445/an-email-that-was-going-around-wall-street-this-morning

Not sure if this is real, but this kind of mentality is just enraging.

I don't see anything wrong with that. I found that part about the teachers to be particularly appealing.

At least being a prostitute helps people.

:awesome:! Doubt it's legitimate but it helps to illustrate the unintended consequences of demonizing an industry.

That's what happens when incentives are artificially changed. You think people on Wall St would remain there if for instance there was some cap on wages (not likely, but illustrating a point)? Where will they go after that? If they are qualified they will most likely go take other jobs with either higher pay, or start doing things for themselves that they would normally pay for since they could afford it. Consumption of goods increases with incomes as well, so it makes sense their consumption patterns will change.

Well, it is true that a lot of middle class Americans are freaking lazy.

If anyone believes that someone who makes 500k+ a year, will 'gladly' go back to driving econo-cars, doing their own yardwork, and working for nothing wages, they are a fool. The only wealthy people who know how to work hard are the ones that worked hard to get there, and unfortunately, many of them didn't have to climb to the top, they were simply placed there.

This is a pet peeve of mine. Nothing personal, but where are the statistics on this, where are the facts that back this up? I mean, you always hear people (usually more liberally-minded people) speaking like most people who are better off than they are got there without working for it, or were given it. I don't dispute that these cases exist, just like I don't dispute that some people get dealt a real crappy hand, too...but what are the actual numbers of these? Can we really say one or the other is more prevalent?

Yeah, playing the stock market is just like gambling. Except instead of your money, it's other people's money, and instead of losing your house and family, your friends at the white house cover your tab and you make EVEN MORE money.

Just like gambling.

I love how this colossal prick conveniently omits the fact that he'd be taking a massive pay cut and suffering the accompanying devastation, since money seems to be all he cares about.

I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but what you're saying is incredibly foolish. The stock market is very different from gambling, and you're oversimplifying the concept.

1. In gambling, you don't ever own anything. In the stock market, you own something that changes value. In gambling, you're "buying" an opportunity; a chance; a non-existent idea. In stock trading, you're buying a commodity, a fractional part of a real firm with real assets and real goods.
   
2. In gambling, when you lose, you have nothing. In the stock market, when you lose, you still possess an item that is not as valuable as before.
   
3. In gambling, when you lose, you're done. You cannot recover what you've lost. In the market, when you lose, you still hold an item that has the possibility of regaining value.
   
4. In gambling, the house has the advantage. In the stock market, the one who has the advantage is the one who does his homework. Gambling is a game of chance, with no skill (excepting blackjack). Stock trading is a craft, and one with skill and research will fare better than one without.
   
5. Stock prices fluctuate because of expected profit - this is why stock values change with news and other events. Just the fact that stock is bought or sold can cause the value of a stock to rise or fall. In the end, though, true value of the firm in question is what causes it's stock to be at a particular price. In gambling, there is no value involved. It's a zero-sum situation. One person's loss is exactly the same as another's gain. There is no change in true value.

Um, what?

Sounds about right. You can't have a middle class without an upper class.

...Did you even read the link?

Yeah?

I find this quite entertaining. It seems a bit overdramatic but, overall I don't find too much wrong with this mindset. If the people on wallstreet blatantly lied then, yeah they should be held responsible. However "wall street" can't lose your money if you don't give it to them. In reality I doubt any wallstreet guys would take teaching or gardening jobs. Although it would be interesting to see how someone with their drive and work ethic would do in a teaching position.

Stickz was referencing the first paragraph.

It's just a good talking point. Considering also that such loose terms are used it's hard to argue. The actual fact is that most American millionaires are "first generation rich". That doesn't preclude any possiblity that they received benefit from some set of circumstances but I don't see why that should be viewed as a negative. If I bust my ass to pay for my kids pre-school and some sort of subsequent non-public education, why should some liberal hater throw that in his face someday?

I rarely hear liberals stating that "most" of these people inherited their wealth. They usually just say "many" like KOP_AoEJedi did. A simple Google search for "percentage of wealthy that inherited wealth" will yield a few sources. We can actually discover which case is more prevalent.

I honestly bet that these people live lifestyles that are expensive enough that their liquid assets would not last very long if they lost their source of income (or even if their income went down). While for most people who are very rich, they would have more than their luxuries to worry about if their income source vanished (because it would mean that something very bad had happened to the economy), while the people on wall street could easily lose quite a lot if they made a wrong desicison.

There is also the fact that a lot of old-money types don't spend extravagantly, because their minimising of their spending is what allowed them to stay rich in the first place.

I have no problem with people getting rich, it is just when they show the arrogence that is in that letter that I get annoyed.

Big ****ing deal. Either it's fake and somebody made a fool of themselves trying to make a fool out of wall street, or it's real and somebody who made it big is touting such and who gives a **** anyway? Anybody who finds this enraging either doesn't understand how a free state us supposed to work or is pissed about having not a lot of money.

Nobody ****ing held a gun to anybody's head and forced them to spend $950,000 on a ho hum lower middle class home in the California suburbs. Nobody put a knife to your throat and told you to take out 400 large worth of equity on a house you bought back in the 90s for less than half that. You agreed to the loan, you signed the papers, YOU ****ED UP. Middle class America ****ed themselves over by being a bunch of materialistic dumb****s and giving in to idiotic offers that they thought they could afford because they wanted a nice purse or a new boat or an expensive house and now look. Who's fault is it? Way to many responsible working people who made smart financial decisions are suffering because their idiotic peers couldn't recognize an unsustainable offer or a false economy if it hit them in the face.

Hah, cool sig, Steven. And I'm not referring to mine, since I've laid claim to "Steven" for longer than you. Oh, but I do think mine is cool too. Stevens have cool sigs!

The housing boom sucked. A lot of people who took out mortgages did it because their monthly payment was lower than paying rent. I'm gonna gamble here and say that you're a teenager who lives in his mom's basement.

Steven has an excuse at least: he's a sociopath who's only apologizing for the rich sociopaths because he thinks he has a shot at it.

This article was a piece of crap, and obviously fake. There are only two kinds of people in finance: the smart and the stupid.
The smart people are the ones who come up with derivatives, and design the software/hardware to do a billion trades a second. If they get axed they're going back to academia - forget landscaping and teaching high school.
The stupid people are the guys who were drinking or sleeping in the back of their Econ 101 class. Guys like Dubya, legacies who are third or fourth-generation rich (or well-connected,) graduated from a good school with a Gentleman's B+ and don't have an ounce of business sense. They "work" for 18 hours a day in the same sense that having a mistress is "work." 90% of the ******* analysts they hire are these guys.

Read Liar's Poker.

Psychopath, homeboy, psychopath.

And only a factor 1 psychopath at that.

I don't disagree with much of your post and the part I take issue with I don't disagree with in factual basis. However, the fact is that we have a system that encourages home ownership and we also have a [government imposed] system that encourages banks to lend to more risky borrowers (I could expound this simple sentence but I don't think you need me to). People, for whatever reason, felt comfortable getting into mortgages without taking into account whether or not the could stay afloat if their industry went to crap, job was gone, relocation was forced, etc. For whatever reasons, people felt comfortable disregarding all financial risks associated with multi-hundreds of thousands of dollars in liability. That to me points to many other significant issues beyond a simple decision based upon rent vs. mortgage.

I don't care why they did it. They obviously bit off more than they could chew. Tough ****.

Isn't it more like they bit off just enough, but then someone came up and crammed a bunch more into their mouths?

Also, Jon said the monthly payment on their mortgage was at the time lower than rent. Something like that has a huge impact on one's life when they don't fall into some higher income bracket, so I think it's an understandable risk to take. Add to that the banks leading people to believe in a bright future in terms of interest rates, and opting for a mortgage may understandably have seemed an attractive prospect.

Also you're a hurf durf huge moron if you don't foreclose on a house that's underwater.

I actually didn't find anything too out of the ordinary in that post :S it seems like most of the people around me (college) wouldn't find anything surprising about that post (even if it's not necessarily authentic)

Or you could....

....get ready for it.......

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Pay back the money you borrowed?

Whoa.

It's not the lender's fault that you borrowed money from them and spent it on an asset that was at the peak of it's value. I don't blame them one bit for doing it and I would do the exact same thing, a thousand times over, if I was in their situation. Same thing with the credit card companies. You don't HAVE to accept the assrape interest rate cards and I have absolutely zero sympathy for the people who do. You made a ****ing deal when you accepted that high interest card, stop being a god damn leeching weaselly pussy and hold up your end of the deal.

Is it put in place to screw you? OF COURSE IT IS! DUH! Thats the nature of the system. It's up to you not to make the BONEHEADED decision of accepting it.

I could rant forever about this but I'm really just saying the same 2 words over and over and over again: Buyer beware.

While I agree that personal irresponsibility was a big part of the crisis, you cannot also discount the fact that the government WAS encouraging homeownership by encouraging the risky loaning in the first place. There is fault on many sides of this. I completely agree that people who took out these loans who couldn't pay them back were stupid, but there is a good chance that these risky loans wouldn't of been made in the first place if there hadn't been a strong systemic and governmental push to loan (as well as a belief among wall street that they WOULD get bailed out if they failed, and that proved out to be extremely right. That belief alone changes the pattern of loans and behavior). If the government's job is indeed to look out for all of us, it did that very poorly and you can't ignore that. You can't deny all the other monetary factors that even the government really has no control over, but the Federal Reserve does (incredibly low interest rates, etc)

You're so adorable. You're like a stag who won't use his antlers because the hunters don't have any.

Banks are businesses. When you get a mortgage (or any other collateral-backed debt,) they're investing 10% of the money in you, and 90% of it in the property. The reason you're able to foreclose on a mortgage, the reason you should foreclose on a mortgage, is so you aren't stuck with 100% of the responsibility for a bad investment that was only 50% your fault. If the system worked right a CDS would have kept the bank from taking the loss anyway.

Actually, this is an exceedingly stupid statement. You might be a moron if you are underwater and can't afford the payment but to simply say someone should renege their commitment to repay their loan, and destroy their credit, simply because the current market value of their home is lower than the financed amount is asinine. You can use the same logic to run the banks or liquidate investments everytime the market goes down. For someone that seems to love economic prosperity based upon debt, to suggest that people are stupid if they don't act selfishly and greedily when the value of their home declines doesn't make much sense.

To me it seems that before you lend money, there should be some investigation if the borrower can eventually pay you back. That involves also looking into what they are investing the loan into. If you are giving a million dollar loan to a guy who makes minimum wage (with good credit) on a property whose value is grossly inflated, that seems like a pretty risky proposition. Don't you think the bank should have had a little foresight? At what point would you say the lender made a mistake?

The fault lies on both ends, and to be honest the company whose business it is to handle money should know better. I'm not saying the borrower is guiltless, but placing the blame solely on them is a bit unfair to the entire picture.

ahahahaha

A foreclosure affects your credit rating a lot less and for a much shorter time than having a large outstanding debt that is not backed by collateral.

Let's see, you think that showing you're incapable of repaying loans is better for your credit rating than continueing to make the payments that, presumably, fit well enough into your budget that you were able to get the financing to begin with? How on Earth could you advocate people dumping the house whenever they are upside down? Anytime a housing market decline occured it would be followed by a huge economic down turn if people followed your logic. Keep in mind, I wouldn't mind. Bad economic times are much better for people who aren't in debt and provide great opportunity for investment.

It is the lenders' responsibilities to not make retarded loans, though. I'm not saying that they should be omniscient, but (greatly simplified) one of the main faulty assumptions that allowed for the entire housing bubble to expand and burst was that housing prices would always go up, which then motivated the creation of financial instruments to allow for subprime lending to occur (and which incentivized subprime borrowers to borrow). Everyone thought housing prices would only go up -- including the borrowers, who thought that because of that, they would be able to use the expected appreciation on their houses to help pay off their mortgages. And this expectation was not in little part due to the lenders' expectations (and communication) that housing prices would only go up. So in reality, it's just because everyone was making logically sound decisions on faulty assumptions.