Too Big To Fail

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endlesszeal

Senior Member
Chill Friday evening and caught this docudrama on HBO. Covers the late financial crisis and I was wondering how much of it is accurate.

Lehman folds because of bad investments. AIG fucks everyone cuz they cant cover their policies when banks coming knocking due to their to retard loans to dipshit making min. wage who bought a $250k home. Then pandemonium ensues and everyone pointing fingers. McCain becomes Captain Save-a-Hoe?

Im sure there is much more that contributed to the tumbling Jenga bricks tracing back to Jimmy Carter? What I want to know is how accurate the film is portraying what they did.
 
What part or parts are inaccurate? I'm sure plenty of material is omitted in terms of whose fault it was or the role said party part took.

Can't let palin admit she can't see russia from her house or obama saying welfare is for the lazy (99% of the time).
 
This whole mess started because of credit default swaps,which are, in short, unregulated insurance policies that are written. Basically AIG will insure a loan that Webster Bank gives to someone for a mortgage protecting Webster if that person doesn't pay back the loan. AIG simply pays Webster Bank. The problem is the insurance policies were not regulated by the government. In normal insurance policy, the insurer is required to hold that money in reserves. AIG was not required to hold that money in reserves. Mutilply that scenario by 100,000,000 and that is essentially how this country went down the tubes. Everyone started defaulting on their mortgages and the insurers of those credit swaps didn't have the money to pay back the banks for the insurance.

They estmiated the value of credit default swaps to be near 13 trillion dollar in unregulared insurance.
 
I say the only fault in the crisis was the bailout. Your bank goes under, you get the house, you couldn't afford in the first place, for free. Don't like that idea? Banks shouldn't have leveraged themselves so much. Bailing them out allows them to not even learn the lesson. Banks are still heavily leveraged. By the books, almost every major bank/financial institution's debt/equity ratio is shit. They still have way way way too much debt. And that doesn't even include the off balance sheet financing that doesn't have to be incorporated in those numbers (Enron...). And off balance sheet financing is still legal. Let the highly leveraged die, and then people will learn.

But yea, I need to catch this movie.
 
I say the only fault in the crisis was the bailout. Your bank goes under, you get the house, you couldn't afford in the first place, for free. Don't like that idea? Banks shouldn't have leveraged themselves so much. Bailing them out allows them to not even learn the lesson. Banks are still heavily leveraged. By the books, almost every major bank/financial institution's debt/equity ratio is shit. They still have way way way too much debt. And that doesn't even include the off balance sheet financing that doesn't have to be incorporated in those numbers (Enron...). And off balance sheet financing is still legal. Let the highly leveraged die, and then people will learn.

But yea, I need to catch this movie.

why do people always see the small point of things...Bail outs aren't just about saving companies...they are about saving american jobs.....If GM failed, thats over 200,000 people out of a job on unemployment and even more foreclosures, no money being pumped into the economy, not being able to feed their families which will increase crime rates etc.. etc...every cause has an effect....
 
I was under the impression that GM would have gone through Chapter 11 and restructured. Not close completely. Or am i way off base here.
 
GM would have gone through restructuring after it was sold to the highest bidder. Another auto giant would have bought it and made a better product. A few people might have lost jobs, but the assets/machinery of the company are here. The jobs would have stayed here. Imagine what GM would be putting out if it was owned by Germans, or Volvo, or a SUCCESSFUL auto maker.

Companies can fail. It's not the end of the world. Their assets and properties will be sold to other companies. Then those companies need to staff that expansion. Creation of jobs. Hell, if the executives of the failed company care about their employees at all and negotiate with the buyers, the only real change will be the name on the front of the building.
 
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GM would have gone through restructuring after it was sold to the highest bidder. Another auto giant would have bought it and made a better product. A few people might have lost jobs, but the assets/machinery of the company are here. The jobs would have stayed here. Imagine what GM would be putting out if it was owned by Germans, or Volvo, or a SUCCESSFUL auto maker.

Companies can fail. It's not the end of the world. Their assets and properties will be sold to other companies. Then those companies need to staff that expansion. Creation of jobs. Hell, if the executives of the failed company care about their employees at all and negotiate with the buyers, the only real change will be the name on the front of the building.

I was going to say exactly this. GM going out of business wouldn't make the factories or most of the jobs just disappear, it means another car company buys it all for pennies on the dollar and has that much more capacity to offer their customers.
 
It's the politician mentality/propaganda that if this company goes under, nothing will replace it. That simply is almost never true. If there is still a market for a product, a company will fill the niche and grab that share of the market.
 
why do people always see the small point of things...Bail outs aren't just about saving companies...they are about saving american jobs.....If GM failed, thats over 200,000 people out of a job on unemployment and even more foreclosures, no money being pumped into the economy, not being able to feed their families which will increase crime rates etc.. etc...every cause has an effect....

Hopefully crime would increase to the point of murderous violence and they would all kill each other. This country really needs to drop some dead weight soon...
 
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