What is Occupy Wallstreet?

[kandrathe]

In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending.

Which normal citizens took advantage of buddy. Don't just blame the bankers. I personally know, and I bet almost everyone on these boards does also, at least three people who rode the wave trying to cash in on home prices and got burned. Whose choice was that? The bankers didn't force them to sign these balloon rates. I'd hope if they bought a house, people would understand what the hell they were doing. Unless your implying all Americans are too stupid to understand what they are doing from day to day, and the bankers are the ones who control the world? This is a load of hogwash.

Well, the deregulation we are talking about is presumably, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, from wikipedia,

On November 4, the final bill resolving the differences was passed by the Senate 90-8,[14] and by the House 362-57. The legislation was signed into law by President Clinton on November 12, 1999. Clinton's support of the repeal is revealed in the following statement by a Goldman Sachs partner Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary"

“The banking industry is fundamentally different from what it was two decades ago, let alone in 1933.” He said the industry has been transformed into a global business of facilitating capital formation through diverse new products, services and markets. “U.S. banks generally engage in a broader range of securities activities abroad than is permitted domestically,” said the Treasury secretary. “Even domestically, the separation of investment banking and commercial banking envisioned by Glass-Steagall has eroded significantly.”

And,

“Over the past seven years we have tried to modernize the economy. And today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority.”

In 2009, McCain and Cantwell proposed re-enacting the Glass-Steagall Act.

But, what we got instead is a watered down Dodd-Frank, which in my opinion, is little more than another costly expansion of government filled with thousands of unintended consequences, such as BOA raising its ATM fees since they are constrained in earning money in other areas by the bill.

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So funny that he didn't try to retort my post, lol. He knows very well I'd tear him apart.

Presumably with your fiery and icy talons. I just decided to get some popcorn and enjoy the show... And... I'm still waiting...

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I think college students are upset because their unemployment rate is more like 37%, and they face student loan hell once they graduate or drop out. Scholarships, and grants have not kept up with the inflation rate of tuition. They face an uncertain present, and future.

Source? My understanding is that college graduates' unemployment is more like 3.7% than 37%. (Well, 4.2%)

You look to the BLS, and I turn to the NYTimes. Odd times indeed. Next, I'll be quoting Krugman. I was counting unemployment and underemployment, which is probably the discrepancy (along with the usual BLS deceptions of U-3, U-6, U-235).

...might as well point at the people snatching up the homes first.

To be fair... Let's put the blame squarely on the deceptive nature of Mortgage Backed Securities. So then who to blame? 1) They were invented by Freddie Mac in the early 70's, and then Fannie Mae jumped onboard back in the early 80's, so we can blame these quasi-government agencies for coming up with the idea, 2) We can blame the ratings agencies (S&P, Moody, et.al.) that failed to adequately assess the risks involved in buying them, 3) we can squarely blame the loose mortgage lenders who specialized in originating mortgages, packaging them, and disposing of them quickly, and 4) we can blame the victims who were the banks and other investors who bought and held them due to their high rate of return. So, the rub, as Krugman puts it as the end of his article on TARP, is "What we want is a system in which banks own the downs as well as the ups." They get the bailouts for their mal-investments, but they also get the profits. The taxpayer gets stuck holding the bag filled with different colors of crap, in the downside risks of toxic assets, the costs of administration of government programs for them, and the higher fees the banks charge us for their disruptions in earnings.

I really can't blame the home purchasers who bought the products (even ARMS) since they had pretty good disclosure on what they were buying, and many people who I know who got burned by rising interest rates eventually either moved into a fixed rate mortgage or toughed it out until the interest rates tanked again. Most of the families I know who are suffering the risk of foreclosure are suffering from unemployment, or underemployment, rather than upside down mortgages (which really is where the customer walks away from their contractual obligation leaving the lender to foreclose on the "toxic asset").