Generational Dynamics World View

[pbrower2a]

(01-02-2019, 10:06 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote:

(01-01-2019, 10:24 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: >   The fraudulent securities were hitting the market while Dubya was
>   President

Nobody even admitted that crimes were being committed until around
2009.  I wrote about it in 2010:

** Financial Crisis Inquiry hearings provide 'smoking gun' evidence of widespread criminal fraud
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/w...100414.htm

After I wrote this article, I was absolutely certain that there would
be criminal prosecutions.  It's still shocking to me that these
bankers got away with these massive crimes.

Maybe you did not see the article in Businessweek in 2005 (I forget the issue) in which the authors exposed the rating fraud of the collateralized debt obligations (CDO's) that underpinned the real-estate fraud predicated upon predatory lending, but no matter how one packages $#!+, it is still $#!+.

Having known both Boomers and X, I can  tell you that both generations have their salt-of-the-Earth types. The extreme narcissists among Boomers are essentially the ones who could get away with it. Sure, I remember some very narcissistic expressions among us as kids, many of us having been extremely conceited. There's nothing like having a job that mandates servility (as in retailing or restaurant work) that inculcates humility. Perhaps that comes with a side of resentment, but most of us learned to put on that theatrical "Happy to serve you!" smile as we sold stuff, accepted money for gasoline and convenience store items, or served "firs with that" as we wondered what we were doing in a place like that, holding onto a job that we thought was fine for high-school drop-outs. When we found our ways into bureaucratic organization we found -people who had a critical three-year head-start due to family connections, rigid and low glass ceilings, and our bosses with those three-year head-starts thinking of us less completely human than they were. They could get away with their narcissistic behavior, but we still had to defer to bosses who treated us like dirt.

X? The bulk had lesser chances plying by the rules. Many chose to not play by the rules. The ones who started small  businesses at least became the true heroes of capitalism, the people who create jobs before getting market share or strong cash flow, and fill niches that corporate behemoths ignore. Of course there were the usual skilled tradesmen, degreed professionals, and salespeople who played by the rules and people of modest dreams who lived as Marx said proles would live under capitalism. (It is up to the capitalists, executives, and property owners to decide whether the Marxist stereotype of capitalism is reality or fiction). The worst found ways to succeed in a plutocratic order by finding shady ways to get some gains for themselves while comforting their bosses. Those are shysters. They could turn a bigger, but crooked profit through some hustle. Dubya's "Opportunity Society" gave such people the opportunity of their dreams with the real estate scam. Get someone to put as big a down-payment on a house as possible, and encourage him to buy (with the aid of crooked real-estate agents) a house as expensive as possible in full  knowledge that the schmuck would never be  able to pay for it. In a market with rising real-estate prices, foreclosure could be more profitable than a mortgage borrower successfully paying off the loan. Interest was of course astronomical, and negative amortization ensured that the owner of the white elephant of a ' home' could never sell it to another potential buyer. In a couple years it would be foreclosed upon for the profit of a shyster. 

You can see what is wrong with this. This is obviously not the Bailey Building and Loan Society in It's a Wonderful Life; it isn't the norm of residential lending of the post-WWII era in which the banker arranges credit for the purchase of a small bungalow in the suburbs under rigid underwriting rules (the mortgage borrower should never pay more than 35% of his income for housing expenses or buy a house that costs more than three-and-a-half year's of pay, not including overtime or any possibility of career advancement) or part-time income by the secondary income-earner. Those houses might be three bedrooms and one bath, but they serve everyone involved. The banker gets interest, and the home-owner pays off the loan except if there is an early death that stops the income flow. It was also good for the kids who got some privacy and quiet for doing homework or practicing on a musical instrument.

So far as I know, Jerry Mathers ("Beaver Cleaver") is still around, but he is now old. But we also have the depravity of a 3T during the Double-Zero Decade, just like another slum-of-a-decade, the 1920s, when similar lending occurred, if not on as blatant a scale. that time it was a securities hustle, and we all know how that went.

Remember: the salt-of-the-earth types do real economic good -- milking the cows, changing the oil in cars and doing auto repairs, doing hair, teaching kids in school, keeping the books, delivering the mail, fighting fires, and enforcing the law. You may not like beng pulled over for doing 46 in a 35 zone, but you'd probably call 911 on your cell phone if you saw a blatant drunk.

It's the people who do the real work who make it possible for the heirs of real entrepreneurs to make easy money off dividends and  real-estate rentals, for business executives paid very well for treating employees badly, and for the crooked operators to feast upon the gullible who are convinced that they have but one chance at their dreams. Capitalism depends upon easy investing and reliable streams of income. We can do without the shysters and cheats. The system works better when there are few ways to make a crooked buck, and when doing honest work is a more reliable way of making a living than is doing something crooked.

Quote:If you're trying to convince me that Republicans are as corrupt as
Democrats, it has nothing to do with party.  Peter Schweizer, who used
to be Breitbart senior editor, wrote a book a few years ago about the
massive corruption by both parties in Congress.

It's not about political party.  It's about generation.  Speaking
generally, Boomers are honest and Gen-Xers are crooks, including
Obama.  Even today, all or almost all of the indictments from the
special prosecuter have been Gen-Xers, because Gen-Xers are crooks,
while Trump himself has (so far) escaped this huge tidal wave of
vitriolic attacks of all kinds because he's a Boomer, hence honest.

I have seen plenty of reports by reputable journalists that Barack Obama operated one of the cleanest Presidencies ever. Even Jimmy Carter had the shady Bert Lance. Obama -- eight years, and no indictments of anyone connected to him. As vindictive as Donald Trump is, you might expect him to have pushed for some prosecution of his predecessor. Manafort, Gates, Flynn, Papadopoulos, Cohen... it just gets worse. Robert Mueller has had to speak of someone as "Individual #1" to avoid mentioning him by name.

Idealist and Reactive leaders can have faults, and certain faults are more likely for Idealists than for Reactives, and vice-versa. Robert Mueller is a conservative Republican, but I must question whether he considers Donald Trump a conservative, ot at least the sort of conservative with which he would be comfortable. I may be on the Left, but I dislike Nocolas Maduro.

.

Quote:Here's what I wrote in 2016:

Things started changing around 2000 with the rise of Generation-X,
reacting to the excesses of the Boomer generation that grew up after
the war.  While the Boomers passively accepted the values of the
Silent generation, the Gen-Xers, and the Millennials in the generation
that followed were openly contemptuous of those values, and considered
people in the Silent and GI generations to be full of crap.

We've already had one major national disaster: Generation-Xers who
became "financial engineers" in the 1990s, and used their skills to
knowingly create trillions of dollars in phony synthetic securities,
and knowingly defrauded investors, thinking they were screwing their
fathers' generation.  People were defrauded of trillions of dollars,
causing millions of people to lose their homes and jobs and savings.
And worse, President Obama and other Gen-Xers don't even seem to care
about this, as not a single one of these criminals has been
prosecuted, leaving them with their fraudulent winnings and able to
defraud other people.

That is exactly what you get when  you have an economic elite utterly amoral and out for itself alone. A Reactive generation at its worst has leaders who exemplify crass materialism and acquisitiveness and a complete disregard for the traditional decencies that make life tolerable for people who lack the advantages in life. Such people exploit people as severely as possible, following the dictum "do unto others... is it "until they do unto you" or "to the extent that you can get away with it"? Boomers were the worst sorts of business executives, people who exploit people badly yet out of their own self-righteousness see themselves as benefactors to those that they exploit. (That isn't only Boomer behavior; I saw accounts of slave-owning planters who thought that they were God's gift to slaves as beneficiaries of their 'loving guidance'.

This sort of guidance:



that is one way to motivate people: fear and pain.

Quote:By contrast, President Bush #1 and President Clinton reacted to the
Savings and Loan crisis by prosecuting thousands of bankers.
President Bush #2 reacted to the Enron scandal by prosecuting several
top managers.  But President Obama has prosecuted nobody.  Things have
changed with the new generation of politicians.  That's why, for ten
years, I've been writing about the destructiveness and
self-destructiveness of Generation-X, and the worst is yet to come.

Reagan and the elder Bush, neither of them Boomers, allowed the courts to hammer the crooked bankers who facilitate the "Savings-and-Loot" crooks in the 1980s. Thus Charles Keating and Don Dixon.

The 2000 stock market crash was largely the dot.com crash and Enron. On Enron, Dubya may have felt a personal  betrayal having been duped. Enron  crooks were easy targets for prosecutions because they broke the rules and were crooks. Dot.com? The dot.com people had vision of a new order of American commerce that simply didn't pan out. People do not go to prison  for a business failure unless they did something corrupt.

The Bad Bear of 2000 was slower to develop and less severe than that of 2007, let alone 1929. The economic meltdown of 2007 was more pervasive, and it as much reflected choices that people were stuck with. Bubbles create paper by devouring capital. Maybe Obama thought that prosecuting huge numbers of business executives would have done more harm than good. Pragmatist that he is, he chose to get the economy going again  instead of setting up a Reign of Terror.  His choice may have been flawed, but it was one of the best possible. Investors have done well since early 2009 -- well except for December of 2018, perhaps. Economic recovery solves more problems than do prosecutions for technicalities.