Quote from: Meta Cognition on January 17, 2015, 09:07:39 AM

Your own concentrated ignorance.

There would be nothing for me to lick. Perhaps I could concentrate your obsession.

My obsession with not being ignorant?

Yes, you're right. There would be a lot to lick then.

1) God is loving

2) God is righteous

I wholeheartedly disagree.

I'll put a tl;dr at bottom

I've often made a point of differentiating the causality of the financial crisis and the Great Recession, but there's another aspect of the recent downturn that I haven't really dealt with. The housing bubble--that is, the rapid decline in appreciating house prices which occurred (in the U.S.) in 2006.

Often, the argument goes that the Federal Reserve kept interest rates in the economy too low for too long, and promoted a climate of risk-taking an over-activity in the economy. It makes intuitive sense--low interest rates bring new players into the market who then begin constructing houses in order to meet a temporary increase in demand. Eventually, a rise in interest rates or a sharp decrease in lending will pop the bubble.

There's not really any evidence to suggest over-ambitious house-building projects in the 1990s-2005. Housing construction appears to be cyclical on a graph, but this was broken during the aforementioned period and saw a continuous increase in new construction projects for fifteen years. Now, this would be suspect, were it not in line with population growth:

As for prices themselves? The activity differs so much across the states that it's difficult to say. The grey area on the graph is when the interest rate was supposedly held too low by the Fed from 2002 to 2004:

On top of this, the Case-Shiller Index for house prices quite clearly shows a run-up in prices beginning in the late 1990s, which didn't pick up during the period of low interest rates:

The problem, too, with using interest rates as a view for monetary policy is that it isn't reliable. It's true that the federal funds rate (the rate that the central bank directly controls) was very low between 2002-2004, but as we can see in the graph below, nominal income was recovering from something of a shortfall. Monetary policy over that two-year period was, essentially, exactly correct:

The problem was long-term real interest rates. As we can see in the graphs below, rates on ten-year treasury bonds closely followed the fed funds rate, however this changed after 1990 and the two rates essentially 'unhinged':

There are a number of explanations for this, including the one I find somewhat convincing--Bernanke's Global Savings Glut hypothesis. This has garnered support from Alan Greenspan who agrees that the rise in housing prices was probably caused by a decline in long-term rates which the central bank had no control over. And, indeed, looking at several other countries we can see that rising house prices was an almost global phenomenon. House prices were a little different in America, in that they peaked two years before the global downturn, but when you look at the data then it's clear global house prices plunged in 2008-2009 when worldwide nominal income bit the bullet.

But what really matters about all this is that it doesn't matter. The housing bubble, at least in 2006 and in the U.S., really is immaterial to the whole discussion. Following the--roughly--50pc decline in house prices come 2006, unemployment didn't shift. It wasn't until mid-2008 to mid-2009 that unemployment really picked up. . . right as global nominal income tanked, and just before the financial crisis.

The idea that the housing bust made investors skittish is probably correct, but still immaterial. BNP Paribas seized up some of its activity prior to the Recession in Dec. 2007, about a year before Lehman Brothers failed, but history has shown us that credit crunches don't matter. 

TL;DR:

I don't even know what I'm watching.

This should be in serious.

Secondly, corporal punishment is child abuse and should absolutely be illegal.

The Atlantic.

The prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, has emerged over the past tumultuous week as one of the West’s most vocal foes of Islamism, though he’s actually been talking about the threat it poses for a long while. During the course of an interview conducted before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, he told me—he went out of his way to tell me, in fact—that he refuses to use the term 'Islamophobia' to describe the phenomenon of anti-Muslim prejudice, because, he says, the accusation of Islamophobia is often used as a weapon by Islamism's apologists to silence their critics.

Most of my conversation with Valls was focused on the fragile state of French Jewry—here is my post on his comments, which included the now-widely circulated statement that, “if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France”—and I didn’t realize the importance of his comment about Islamophobia until I re-read the transcript of our interview.

“It is very important to make clear to people that Islam has nothing to do with ISIS,” Valls told me. “There is a prejudice in society about this, but on the other hand, I refuse to use this term 'Islamophobia,' because those who use this word are trying to invalidate any criticism at all of Islamist ideology. The charge of 'Islamophobia' is used to silence people.”

Valls was not denying the existence of anti-Muslim sentiment, which is strong across much of France. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, miscreants have shot at Muslim community buildings, and various repulsive threats against individual Muslims have been cataloged. President Francois Hollande, who said Thursday that Muslims are the “first victims of fanaticism, fundamentalism, intolerance,” might be overstating the primacy of anti-Muslim prejudice in the current hierarchy of French bigotries—after all, Hollande just found it necessary to deploy his army to defend Jewish schools from Muslim terrorists, not Muslim schools from Jewish terrorists—but anti-Muslim bigotry is a salient and seemingly permanent feature of life in France.

Or to contextualize it differently: Anti-Muslim feeling appears to be more widespread than anti-Jewish feeling across much of France, but anti-Jewish feeling has been expressed recently (and not-so-recently) with far more lethality, and mainly by Muslims.

It appears as if Valls came to his view on the illegitimacy of 'Islamophobia' after being influenced by a number of people, including and especially the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner and the writer (and fatwa target) Salman Rushdie. Rushdie, along with a group of mainly Muslim writers, attacked the use of the term 'Islamophobia' several years ago in an open letter: “We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of ‘Islamophobia’, a wretched concept that confuses criticism of Islam as a religion and stigmatization of those who believe in it.”

Good for Manuel Valls.

>shitposting this hard

Your own concentrated ignorance.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on January 17, 2015, 08:41:16 AM

Quote from: Rinev Jeqkogo on January 16, 2015, 08:29:03 PM

Does this one look a bit better by any chance?

Spoiler

"Reserv" needs an e on the end of it, and the beige could be a little darker still but yeah, I love it.

Shit, I don't know how I messed that up. This better?

Spoiler

Beautiful, man, thanks a lot.

To add to that, Clinton left us with a $200 BILLION surplus.

I changed the original graph to one which better represents the debt-to-GDP ratio under Clinton.

Started long before Roosevelt.

Looking at the similarities between Teddy and Woodrow Wilson--not really. Of course there were differences, the Republican Party was founded in direct opposition to the Democrats, but the divergence was nowhere near as substantial as they have been in recent years.

Except I know exactly what I'm talking about which is why you can't even make an argument and have no idea what you're talking about.

You haven't said a single thing this entire thread which makes any economic sense.

You fantasize and imagine yourself being intelligent over most of the other losers here, some major accomplishment that is, when in reality you're just another pathetic squirt that wants to be special and whore attention on internet forums because your life is that miserable.

My life's actually all right, thanks. I know I'm more intelligent than most of the other people here when it comes to economics, but I've no doubt people like Turkey have me on mathematics, Icy has me on current affairs--et cetera.

Your entire argument is invalid because the very fabric of it does not work. The economy of the world has already failed, and it will never be corrected without completely starting anew.

That's some grade-A fear-mongering you've got there. If this is true, why didn't monetary easing ruin the economy in the 1930s? Or even in 1987? You've had, essentially, 70 years to play with to demonstrate your hypothesis and you've sorely disappointed.

I know you will never accept the truth and will continue remaining in your cognitive dissonance as always.

Well now you've just gone incoherent.

Do you want to walk away from this like a man, Cam, or do you want me to absolutely rupture your anus some more and reveal your shocking ignorance of the things you choose to discuss?

And the government controls quantitative easing, I've already told you there are many problems, and they are all connected. The people DON'T control money at all, that has been my entire point.

Except we're talking about money demand at the moment. . . Which quantitative easing responds to.

It's like you haven't been reading the thread, or you don't understand economics.

Probably both.

Everybody has a lot to say about the increasing levels of partisanship in U.S. politics. Democrats blame the Republicans, Republicans blame the Democrats and Independents blame the two-party system just because they're special snowflakes. However, partisanship hasn't always been such an issue; it really began under FDR and accelerated through the 1960s under LBJ.

American political history and demographic change has driven this increasing partisanship, but put very simply it's because the parties have become much more ideologically cohesive. There's much less room for moderation, although that isn't to say that efforts aren't being made.

The Blue Dog Democrats (DINOs), who held enough power in Congress as late as 2010 to make Obama drop the public choice option from the ACA, are essentially dead. The tax-and-spend liberals in the northeast and on the west coast (think Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi) have clashed with the Blue Dogs, but their eminence in the party is what has allowed the Republicans to paint them as the party of the poor and of the minorities. With the defections to Reagan, and the turning of the south into a Republican stronghold, the New Democrats--formed under Clinton, Gore and the DLC--tried to shift the party closer to the centre with a more business-friendly orientation. The party has, since these shifts, oscillated between the old-style, tax-and-spend liberals and the New Democrats.

The Republicans have seen less factionalism within their own party, but it's increased in recent years. The Rockefeller Republicans, the compassionate conservatives and the Main Street Republicans all had an uneasy coalition until 2008. The "Reagan Coalition" of all the divergent factions--which was given a boost in 1994 by Newt Gingrich--died out when Obama was elected, and since then the Tea Party have encouraged their shift to the Right. The number of Rockefeller Republicans has declined, not least because of defections like that of Arlen Specter's in 2009.

Even the Tea Party, however, has essentially died out. From 61 congressional members in March 2011, the Tea Party Caucus is essentially defunct. With the failure of Mitt Romney in 2012, Reince Preibus--joined by Jeb Bush and Colin Powell--began calling for a party reform to make the party more inclusive and attractive to young people, women and minorities. However, there's no strategy for moving ahead without alienating the traditional Republican voter-base.

All of these shifts towards ideological homogeneity have resulted from demographic changes beginning in the 1950s, and electoral processes like gerrymandering, which solidify party lines and make it politically expensive for House or Senate members to make compromises or look to be weak.

I rushed this, somewhat, so if anybody has any questions I'll be happy to take them.

TL;DR:

such as why demand is changing and whether or not the changes are either productive or handled correctly

I don't think you understand money demand. . .