Dlawbailey

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We're so glad you're here! NuclearWarfare (talk) 13:39, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi Dlawbailey, thanks for the edits on the John M. Reich page. You have done a good job at making your edits relevant to Mr. Reich. Also, job well done in redirecting "John Reich" to "John M. Reich." Coasting (talk) 18:35, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Warning on Copyright Violation

Please do not add copyrighted material to Wikipedia without permission from the copyright holder. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material; such additions will be deleted. You may use external websites as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. Arbiteroftruth (talk) 01:47, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Yikes, thanks for the warning. I was trying to cleave as closely as possible to authoritative content.

Do you think I went past "fair use"? I didn't mean to. --Dlawbailey (talk) 22:44, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

To put it simply, treat writing Wikipedia as you would when you are writing an essay for a High School or University class: rewrite the lines in your own words, and cite the source where you got it from. Inserting copyrighted texts into a page could get it deleted (and there have been cases where that has happened, although it takes a lot more than a couple of lines to do it. Nevertheless, it is still good ethics to rephrase).

Hope that helps with your question, and happy editing! If you need help, please let me know. I am more than willing to help in any way I can. Arbiteroftruth (talk) 02:51, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Hello, Dlawbailey. You have new messages at Mfield's talk page.
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Subprime mortgage crisis

To Dlawbailey: Appreciate your edits to the article and I happen to agree with you on many points. Generally, I've got no issues with what you've included. Do your best to write for the layperson, a constant challenge in this article. I disagree with parts of your op ed in the discussion page. We're talking opinion so everybody is entitled to theirs on the discussion page--all else we cite, to paraphrase Reagan.

• People are ultimately responsible for their actions. We cannot have a systemic crisis if people, companies, and government live within their means. You make a 20% down payment, with six months worth of emergency cash still in the bank, or you rent, period. Government's balance the budget and banks keep 10-15% quality capital in the proverbial vault. That should be taught in high school and inscribed in a monument near the Capital building. And most knew they were in over their heads and taking a risk. They got caught up the mania and thought they had a free lunch, no doubt encouraged by the media, government, and their friendly neighborhood mortgage broker. A home is not an entitlement, it is a reward for hard-fought earning and saving over one or more generations. That is why only the top two-thirds of the economic food chain have historically been able to afford them, and why multiple families or generations sometimes live in just one. I'm really tired of people blaming others when they mess up. This crisis is the people's fault as much as it is the banks fault or the regulators fault. I look at my 401K and I say wow, I've been responsible and a bunch of idiots on both the borrowing and lending side forgot the corollary to the golden rule: THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH. If it looks free, it ain't. Nobody gives something for nothing. Adults know better. Plenty of heavy hitters support this view, including Obama. It's all cited. So I disagree with the "trivially dismissed" part of your argument above.
• I'd like to see some more high-profile indictments, fines, firings, and congressional resignations before we pursue the thesis that fraud is a primary cause here. Once you can cite some top economists, central bankers, or regulators on that (e.g., Bernanke, Krugman, Stiglitz, Roubini, Zandi, Shiller), please do so. Its an issue, but I don't think a critical issue. It wouldn't make my top 10 and hasn't made theirs either.
• Similar to your views on collateral, I think this crisis is more about excess leverage or weak capital cushions. Rather than build a cushion in a boom time, people, banks and government got further leveraged. Heck, even a squirrel with a brain 3 peas long is smart enough to put away the darn chestnuts and get a nice tummy in the fall. Nearly all U.S. stakeholders--banks, individuals, government--are in far over their heads. Markets are not all that different from the seasons or organic systems. When times are good, save up, 'cuz times will get hard.
• I wonder if the U.S.A. is too big to fail. We may find out if we keep acting like we can just print money and borrow to fund ourselves. China and oil-producing countries are now the bankers to the world, soaking up money like sponges--our money. Our regulators and politicians let banks hide how much capital they really had (or didn't have, as the case may be). Our government sets a terrible example with its budgeting, borrowing, and spending. Krugman and Bernanke have written on the contribution of trade deficits to this debacle. Our rampant spending caused money from overseas to flood our markets, driving asset prices up.
• The broader truth emerging here is that the shadow banking system was allowed to grow and collapse without proper oversight. Long-Term Capital Management was the recent clarion call that nobody did anything about; the Panic of 1907 was the history we all forgot, with a bank run on unregulated trusts (sound familiar?) Geithner has talked about a "run on the shadow banking system." To quote one of the great lines from this crisis, in Krugman's new book: "As the shadow banking system expanded to rival or even surpass conventional banking in importance, politicians and government officials should have realized that they were re-creating the kind of financial vulnerability that made the Great Depression possible--and they should have responded by extending regulations and the financial safety net to cover these new institutions. Influential figures should have proclaimed a simple rule: anything that does what a bank does, anything that has to be rescued in crises the way banks are, should be regulated like a bank." Amen. Now who will resign over that?
• This crisis makes it clear how badly we need term limits on Congress and restrictions of campaign contributions to $200 from individuals only, not organizations. I really do think the future of the country may depend on this, because if you trace the root causes far enough back and keep asking "why" you get to this: Wall St. bought our politicians. People who are only in for one term and have to get funding from individuals don't care about that. Dodd, Frank, and Schumer should have resigned in shame already. We're calling for executives to be fired but the calls for impeaching politicians seem silent. Why is that? Will no politicians give our media an interview while the reporter is relentlessly calling for their resignation? Not one key politician has taken ownership for this and resigned. Amazing.Farcaster (talk) 05:02, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Farcaster, thanks for your input on the op-ed. As you can see I like people to know why I am doing the edits I'm doing so they can confront my ideas directly.

As to your other points, if by "people are ultimately responsible for their actions" you mean to include "very highly-paid, professional financiers with a fiduciary responsibility to value things properly," you're obviously completely wrong. Those "people" are obviously not to be held responsible for anything they do in this society. You seem eager to hold everyone responsible but them. Who, Farcaster, ended up with the money??? People who are losing their homes or making outlandish mortgage payments on houses with negative equity? What "free lunch" did they get? They got less than nothing. Investors? They got less than nothing. I suggest you get off your high horse about economic virtue and follow the money. It will lead you in the right direction. In light of the behavior of scoundrels like those at IndyMac, the other economic "norms" you put forward are quaint fantasies. The idea, by the way, that you have somehow suffered because consumers borrowed too much is simply ludicrous. The idea that this crisis came about because a bunch of middle- and working-class people felt that THEY were over-entitled is just silly.

As for fraud, you're talking about macroeconomists. Macroeconomists don't generally study the effect of fraud because fraud is hard to put numbers on because, well, it's fraud. Instead, they just assume all the numbers they use are true. Those that do study the importance of fraud - like Hernando De Soto, author of "The Mystery Of Capital" - are screaming about fraud's importance in this crisis - that this crisis came from fraud so deep it constitutes an almost existential threat to the legal underpinnings of property. I refer you to his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Economists talk about "global imbalalances" because it's easy, not because it's true. To use one example, Nouriel Roubini's observations have proved very useful but his theories have proved completely wrong. He completely missed the direction of the U.S. dollar, a central pillar of his thesis. The reason is that all currencies are not created equal. The dollar is the "hardest" currency because it's the most widely-accepted, but we don't need to go into that now. There have been few efforts even to collect the data on fraud. I have cited one effort by the rating agency Fitch - an authoritative study - and if you read the Fitch piece you would see the fraud is shocking. I've quoted William Black who is an economist, law professor and was a regulator who helped write the laws. Also there's the FBI. I think they're usually considered pretty authoritative. And then there's just the prima fascie evidence of all those thousands of bogus AAA securities - thousands. Subprime conduit origination was a fraudulent business model. It's just that simple and I'm surprised that's not completely obvious to you. Look what happened when these "banks" were forced to hold maybe 15 months of the garbage they were selling to investors. They started to folded up inside a year. Remember, the originating banks are not holding their subprime from 2005 and most of 2006. That's all gone out to investors. Look at the IndyMac report. There is no explanation for that kind of behavior other than intent to commit fraud.

Household and government leverage is trivial compared to that of financial institutions - trivial. That fact is the fundament of the money-creation process. The problem is $11-$14 TRILLION dollars in cash and credit that has had to be advanced to financial institutions. All the other numbers pale in comparison to that. Simply because things are true, does not mean they are first-order or equal to first-order causes. The problem was a financial system that created money through counterfeit securities. When the counterfeit was discovered, the money vanished. Consumers did not run up $14 trillion in bad debts, financial institutions did. Please add up the numbers.

The United States is a productive economy and the idea that American government and workers are parasitic is simply a projection of the outrageously over-compensated rich people who obviously ARE parasitic given the catastrophically negative value of their behavior. The U.S. has been the producer of the world's international currency. That's problematic, but it's been a boon. Factually, we flooded their markets with money, not the other way around. We did that by creating the world's credit system. That is a good and worthwhile thing - then it was abused and destroyed. If the U.S. fails, my prediction would be that we would start behaving like other failed states throughout history and start to engage in even more intensely violent behavior, very much to our ultimate detriment. The Chinese do not finance America. America finances China and now that that financing is gone, they are in very, very serious trouble.

The problem was not that the shadow banking system was allowed to grow, but that it was allowed to remain in the shadows. That was insane and a product of conservative ideology and greed. I remember having a discussion with a friend of mine who was at what is now JPM Chase. He told me how all this interbank activity didn't have to be regulated because they were all so smart. I agreed that they were smart, but pointed out that people trusted them to do this activity because they were regulated institutions. The ideology did not allow him to see the possibility of value arising from regulation. I pointed out that this was a situation ripe for abuse - still nothing. You're right about LTCM and before LTCM was Enron but this ideology keeps people from remembering the simplest possible truth about markets - you can't put traders in charge of the traded inventory. It's been true since there have been markets.

Dodd, Frank and Schumer should resign? Why is it that only Democrats are responsible for being ethical? I guess Republicans think that if you tell people you believe being bribed by business is right - for you - then it isn't wrong. It's an interesting attitude. As George Bush said: "Some call you the elite. I call you my base." Politicians have resigned. Bush's Director of OTS resigned after failing and lying for IndyMac and he, like you, has called for Congress to take the blame. I wonder why. Don't go down the GSE, Community Reinvestment Act cul-de-sac prepared especially for you by Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute, aka, "The Best Friend Angelo Mozillo Ever Had." CRA default rates are very reasonable and the part of the GSEs book that is responsble for most of their losses is the MBS they bought from Countrywide, IndyMac, Washington Mutual, etc.. Look at the default rates, not the chatter. Yes, the GSEs were badly run. But we know where the losses came from.

Our financial emperors have no clothes on but we can't see that in this country. I don't know why, but we seem to be programmed to give them the benefit of the doubt despite any facts.--Dlawbailey (talk) 09:43, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Dlawbailey, your edits on this article are becoming disruptive. Twice now I've restored pertinent information you've deleted, as with this block of information you deleted, claiming that it was sourced incorrectly. You're wrong. Use more caution when contributing, particularly if your removing work. Scribner (talk) 02:14, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Scribner, you are allowing non-neutral, non-factual contentions to be added to the article despite cited evidence to the contrary which I provided in the discussion page. Several times I have added well-sourced and pertinent information only to have people remove it without reference to its POV, sourcing or factual nature. I've been down this road before. --Dlawbailey (talk) 02:19, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Heritage.org is not a Reliable Source. Scribner (talk) 02:27, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

And now I have quoted it with a Reliable Source and I will make a special point to make sure that all the contentions in the article accurately quote their sources.--Dlawbailey (talk) 03:17, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

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November 2016

Please do not add original research or novel syntheses of published material to articles as you apparently did to Julius Evola. Please cite a reliable source for all of your contributions. Thank you. Sıgehelmus (Talk) |д=) 19:22, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

Clearly, nobody is more authoritative about what Julius Evola says than Julius Evola himself. I would be MORE than happy to add a section on racism to the article, since racism is so completely central to Evola's thinking. Dlawbailey (talk) 19:38, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

Not a good idea to edit war. Use secondary sources to substantiate material that you add to the articles. Please see WP:RS to help identify reliable sources. K.e.coffman (talk) 21:19, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

Not a good idea to claim original research or novel synthesis when an editor is only seeking to put the Bio subject's own words out there. What is your problem with Evola's own words? Either specify the misleading or inappropriate language or your edits become tendentious. I will re-phrase and re-quote as many times as needed, but I will not accept wholesale deletion of a Bio subject's own words from his bio. I'm sorry if they are unmistakably racist. Clearly they were meant to be unmistakably racist. Do you have some rationale for disagreeing with that or is this right-wing PC? Dlawbailey (talk) 22:05, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

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