silver 2039
Deity
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If Putin can take Vader he can damn well take any punk who tries to take him out while he's bathing his luscious muscular body.
While We Wait: Part 5
- Thread starter North King
- Start date
If Putin can take Vader he can damn well take any punk who tries to take him out while he's bathing his luscious muscular body.
Or maybe RUSSELL CROWE will end up facing him and they'll kill each other. Truly the best outcome for the world.
silver 2039
Deity
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That would be incredibly homoerotic.
jeps
Arcadefire
Jordan Leopold Roberto Luongo Clearly SARAH PALIN can take Vladmir Putin (especially in a hockey match, à la Ice President [amazing video])
Symphony D.
Deity
I stand corrected. However, I then turn around and say that the Republican candidate is ******** for not hauling in economists and making a case against Obama instead of the bullcrap personal attacks and defamation he is currently conducting. I don't trust a man who can't even run a competent campaign to run the Presidency.
Hey kids, Crassus was actually not an incredibly sucky general. Please take the Battle of Carrhae as a result of excellent Parthian generalship and tactical, operational, and strategic ability, not as one of simply 'the Romans messed up'.
Thanks.
Thanks.
silver 2039
Deity
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Then what was he? Mediocre?
It was an example of a competent general being totally beaten by an unfamiliar form of fighting and a far superior combatant. Think Daun against Friedrich II, or Erzherzog Karl against Napoleon.
North King
blech
- Joined
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Hey kids, Crassus was actually not an incredibly sucky general. Please take the Battle of Carrhae as a result of excellent Parthian generalship and tactical, operational, and strategic ability, not as one of simply 'the Romans messed up'.
Thanks.
Though one could make an argument that the expedition was a poorly planned political ploy. That is to say, he should never have been on the road to Carrhae without a lot more probing first.
Well, yeah, but I don't see what other choice he had. Pompey and Caesar both had conquests under their belts, and he needed to make up the deficit quickly. Syria looked like the easy option, partly because Mithridates II had concluded a peace with Sulla back in the day when Parthia was on the ascendant, and public opinion had it that the Parthians were weak because of it. Plus, the Alexandros Mystique and the typical Graeco-Roman view of the Easterners as effete feminine dilettantes. (Perhaps best personified by Alexandros of Epeiros, who when fighting in Italy was informed of his relative Alexandros Megas' victories over the Persians; his response was that his nephew was fighting women while he had to contend with men.)
das
Regeneration In Process
I don't care how buff he actually is, it still reminds me of Commodus having his gladiators throw fights for him. Shirvani Muradov is going to end up strangling him in his bathtub...
As every Russian Putin joke/meme site would tell you, Putin is a trained KGB agent and therefore a) has precognition, b) has super sense and c) is basically Stirlitz. Which is more than what can be said for Bush.
Because flawed vision is always better than no vision.
Re: Romans vs. Parthians. The Roman army was simply poorly suited for fighting Parthians in Parthian home ground that happened to utterly favour the Parthian tactics of choice. Not that
das
Regeneration In Process
I have absolutely no idea whatsoever as to what you are referring to.
EDIT: Alternatively, you might've just had a "flawed vision" there.
EDIT: Alternatively, you might've just had a "flawed vision" there.
So I got bored and decided to look at the current “Pearl Harbour” of the financial markets; probably the only time that accounting and economics are going to hit the headlines for a prolonged period in my lifetime.
So let’s have a simple look at what happened:
1. Lending institutions lent to people who couldn’t repay home loans (so called “Subprime loans”.
2. They then mixed this “bad” debt into financial instruments with “good” debt, making it an attractive “asset”.
3. These “assets” were then rubber stamped by investment institutions as being “good” investments.
4. They were then on-sold to institutions like Pension Funds in Sweden, and Banks in Europe etc, on the mistaken belief that they were “good” investments.
That’s the basic story, it’s common in the media to scream predatory lending, greed, and blame the financial wizards, which is part of the story.
The other part of the story is a systematic failure by both private and public institutions to accurately gauge the risk of these instruments. PJ O’Rourke puts the difference between good and bad debt quite simply, “A junk bond is a loan to your little brother; a high quality bond is a loan to your little brother by the Gambino family.” We know the lenders made a great many bad loans, to people with no hope of repaying them that has been expounded as the cause of the crisis, it was merely a symptom however of deeper causes. Greed is another favourite target for the media, it was easy money to create financial instruments from bundled loans and to on-sell them but it alone cannot account for the problems. Wall Street financial wizardry was only a symptom of the same causes which led to the poor lending choices on the part of the lenders (consider it a response to the large amount of potential bad debt on the balance sheet of many an institution).
At a fundamental level however all lenders do is manage risk. Why they would lenders lend in the first place to people with shot credit ratings? This was achieved primarily because of poor decisions by government and private concerns that allowed a systematic under valuing of risk.
There is no single cause.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which are (were, now?) “government sponsored enterprise” (read state sponsored, backed, politically controlled, monopolies) were pushed by government to expand the ownership of housing amongst lower and middle class groups. This cause was championed by Clinton, organizations like ACORN, and a government outfit created out of the aftermath of a paper which purported to show institutional racism in the lending market. On the other hand lending institutions were wholeheartedly supportive of the move, and actively lobbied to support lowered lending standards and for underwriting by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so that subprime loans were more attractive on the loans market. The issues associated with lowering the standards were well appreciated, warnings were issued about the risks and they were ignored by all the major players, only token efforts were made to shore up the system. Why were the lenders so enthusiastic about such an altruistic policy of lending to the poor and indigent? Probably because it was made clear by the government that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be bailed out in the advent of any trouble, this led to a reckless profit before risk attitude on the part of management (and similar promises or allusions were made to major lenders about if the issue was ever forced). The Republicans did push for a strong regulatory bill for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2005, McCain did vote for it, Obama did not, it was defeated by democrats, note however that this whole area was not the singular cause.
The Glass-Steagall Act reform (read gutting) is another favourite of the media as a cause, deregulation causing chaos yet again! However that is a pretty dead pony in this debacle, the act did allow banks to be affiliated with underwriters of securities, but none of the firms that went down were even associated or under the auspices of the darn thing, there was almost no intermixing of underwriters and banks before this crisis.
Paradoxically the lowering of lending and underwriting standards by the Clinton administration (not the only one I’m sure) helped lead to the bubble in housing prices, by allowing a large number of new entrants to the market, the prices naturally rose. By how much hasn’t been calculated, but it will likely have contributed to at least some of the increase in housing prices. Another factor that feeds into this bubble, was the low interest rates of the Federal Reserve, which allowed at least on paper (and assuming the rates held steady), for people with little or no income to purchase quite respectively priced homes, this was further assisted by government assistance through Freddie and Fannie and obliging lenders. This was in part a result of increasing inflows of saving from China and from other nations into America, which while significant, were not a large factor unto themselves (America is still a net exporter of capital) but it combined with well a low rate of interest, and increase lending and borrowing for housing purchases all of which helped to create a rapidly growing bubble. This bubble in housing was easy to trace, prices rose by truly colossal values in a single year (double digit growth year on year in many places) which were attractive with low interest rates and what seemed a guaranteed money maker (with the sky the limit for prices)… enter a downturn in house prices, people lent to the hilt, stuck with loans which were greater than the value of the property, teaser rates and other inducements ending and people could still hold on, whatever the proximate cause of the sudden upsurge in defaults is to me unknown (lots of factors have been thrown around), and you have a problem.
So we’ve established the problems, but why and who were institutions buying toxic instruments? US Investment banks snaffled them up, look at the names of the financial firms which have fallen and tell me what they were, European Banks also purchased huge amounts of them, witness the collapse of Iceland’s financial institutions (how can the government guarantee deposits of 600% of GDP? They can’t!), and a great many others picked them up to varying and lesser degrees, the sheer preponderance of them in the market place made them rather commonplace this aura of normality was backed up by ratings agencies which gave them the highest ratings. As a general rule, the normal banks appear to be fine, some have quite heavy liabilities, and others do not have much at all. The instruments alone cannot account for the whole problem, they come together to be a fairly small portion of the financial sectors clout. The initial shock should have been absorbed, if anything it wasn’t noticed by the mainstream media for quite a while after economists and accountants had realised what was happening, their focus was on the loans and the downturn and not the institutions which bought them second hand. Oddly enough it was soaked up. The first collapses were really a mix of ineptitude and something akin to complacency on managements part for not recapitalising when the warning lights were flashing or accepting buyouts or assistance and more institutional factors, not gauging the risk right even after the issue was well known (trading while insolvent is going to come up sometime soon) and complacency on the part of the Federal Reserve (although that point is arguable) as well as other gatekeeper institutions. What is interesting to note is that regulation did not play a significant part, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were regulated to within an inch of their lives and had something like 500 government servants watching and regularly reporting on their actions it wasn’t until Warren Buffet mentioned the collapsing positions of these two that the reports changed from rubber stamping and S&P, Moodies and Fitches downgraded them… the investment banks were handled by the Securities and Exchange Commission which continued to blithely assess the health of the industry as good till the first collapse… the banking watchdogs ignored the collapse of a few minor regional banks which were over geared and didn’t notice the gears of credit falling apart… and heck everyone missed the collapse of the interbank lending service… a series of cascading faults in the system, severe problems tend to be a series of seemingly unrelated events clicking together at just the right moment to cause maximum havoc.
So is there a reason to think the worst? Another Great Depression, doubtful. Even with this chaos, there has been no significant trend downwards in any of the indicators, industrial production remains high, job creation out of the financial sector remains quite high, and even in the financial sector the real damage is limited to only a select handful of institutions. The danger is in it spreading to other parts of the financial sector, and on into sectors of the economy, the first has happened, the collapse of interbank loans is terrible for the credit market that needs to be remedied, while the second is perhaps just beginning.
If anything the market is seeing to much risk, panic comes to mind, because of the speed few entities have had the time to properly assess the situation. So while the actual fallout of the subprime mortgages is relatively minor in the greater scheme of things, nobody has sat down and quite noticed that fact. The real problem is the fact that nobody can price the things, they are basically junk, which is why nobody is purchasing up vast numbers of these, and making new instruments minus the subprime portions typically only 20% the rest is otherwise healthy mortgages. Without a price, nobody is willing to buy them, and you end up with problems.
The government’s response to the crisis is to purchase all or most of those dodgy assets, whose toxic effect on the balance sheets of many firm is the problem and then to just do the sensible thing and wait them out since most of the loans are still good. The problem is this is this complex beyond belief, and is probably not the best means of doing a bail out, it’s a blunt instrument. Suggestions that have been floated including just buying up a slice of the pie of the assets, giving everyone a price to work off, allowing everyone to make estimates of what the real damage is instead of just blithely valuing them at near to zero. Other’s include nationalisation of failing banks, a terrible idea, the government won’t be able to hold them up, and is struck with a bunch of banks which should by all rights be allowed to die. Another is to have the government buy a stake in banks, 20% is the oft cited value, the problem is what’s colloquially called “zombie” firms, firms which might appear healthy on the balance sheet but are in-fact in dire financial crisis they just haven’t realised it yet.
This is not the only issue government is dealing with; the interbank service is going to undergo some changes to induce lending between banks. And the wider credit crunch is being attacked by the Federal Reserve, although there are some serious questions about what the banks are doing with the money they’ve already borrowed *cough hoarding cough*…
The markets should calm down eventually… any partisan sniping about who caused the crisis, will incur my wrath, I'll make sure to explain in full detail about the mechanics of banking and expect you to read it
So let’s have a simple look at what happened:
1. Lending institutions lent to people who couldn’t repay home loans (so called “Subprime loans”
.2. They then mixed this “bad” debt into financial instruments with “good” debt, making it an attractive “asset”.
3. These “assets” were then rubber stamped by investment institutions as being “good” investments.
4. They were then on-sold to institutions like Pension Funds in Sweden, and Banks in Europe etc, on the mistaken belief that they were “good” investments.
That’s the basic story, it’s common in the media to scream predatory lending, greed, and blame the financial wizards, which is part of the story.
The other part of the story is a systematic failure by both private and public institutions to accurately gauge the risk of these instruments. PJ O’Rourke puts the difference between good and bad debt quite simply, “A junk bond is a loan to your little brother; a high quality bond is a loan to your little brother by the Gambino family.” We know the lenders made a great many bad loans, to people with no hope of repaying them that has been expounded as the cause of the crisis, it was merely a symptom however of deeper causes. Greed is another favourite target for the media, it was easy money to create financial instruments from bundled loans and to on-sell them but it alone cannot account for the problems. Wall Street financial wizardry was only a symptom of the same causes which led to the poor lending choices on the part of the lenders (consider it a response to the large amount of potential bad debt on the balance sheet of many an institution).
At a fundamental level however all lenders do is manage risk. Why they would lenders lend in the first place to people with shot credit ratings? This was achieved primarily because of poor decisions by government and private concerns that allowed a systematic under valuing of risk.
There is no single cause.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which are (were, now?) “government sponsored enterprise” (read state sponsored, backed, politically controlled, monopolies) were pushed by government to expand the ownership of housing amongst lower and middle class groups. This cause was championed by Clinton, organizations like ACORN, and a government outfit created out of the aftermath of a paper which purported to show institutional racism in the lending market. On the other hand lending institutions were wholeheartedly supportive of the move, and actively lobbied to support lowered lending standards and for underwriting by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so that subprime loans were more attractive on the loans market. The issues associated with lowering the standards were well appreciated, warnings were issued about the risks and they were ignored by all the major players, only token efforts were made to shore up the system. Why were the lenders so enthusiastic about such an altruistic policy of lending to the poor and indigent? Probably because it was made clear by the government that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be bailed out in the advent of any trouble, this led to a reckless profit before risk attitude on the part of management (and similar promises or allusions were made to major lenders about if the issue was ever forced). The Republicans did push for a strong regulatory bill for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2005, McCain did vote for it, Obama did not, it was defeated by democrats, note however that this whole area was not the singular cause.
The Glass-Steagall Act reform (read gutting) is another favourite of the media as a cause, deregulation causing chaos yet again! However that is a pretty dead pony in this debacle, the act did allow banks to be affiliated with underwriters of securities, but none of the firms that went down were even associated or under the auspices of the darn thing, there was almost no intermixing of underwriters and banks before this crisis.
Paradoxically the lowering of lending and underwriting standards by the Clinton administration (not the only one I’m sure) helped lead to the bubble in housing prices, by allowing a large number of new entrants to the market, the prices naturally rose. By how much hasn’t been calculated, but it will likely have contributed to at least some of the increase in housing prices. Another factor that feeds into this bubble, was the low interest rates of the Federal Reserve, which allowed at least on paper (and assuming the rates held steady), for people with little or no income to purchase quite respectively priced homes, this was further assisted by government assistance through Freddie and Fannie and obliging lenders. This was in part a result of increasing inflows of saving from China and from other nations into America, which while significant, were not a large factor unto themselves (America is still a net exporter of capital) but it combined with well a low rate of interest, and increase lending and borrowing for housing purchases all of which helped to create a rapidly growing bubble. This bubble in housing was easy to trace, prices rose by truly colossal values in a single year (double digit growth year on year in many places) which were attractive with low interest rates and what seemed a guaranteed money maker (with the sky the limit for prices)… enter a downturn in house prices, people lent to the hilt, stuck with loans which were greater than the value of the property, teaser rates and other inducements ending and people could still hold on, whatever the proximate cause of the sudden upsurge in defaults is to me unknown (lots of factors have been thrown around), and you have a problem.
So we’ve established the problems, but why and who were institutions buying toxic instruments? US Investment banks snaffled them up, look at the names of the financial firms which have fallen and tell me what they were, European Banks also purchased huge amounts of them, witness the collapse of Iceland’s financial institutions (how can the government guarantee deposits of 600% of GDP? They can’t!), and a great many others picked them up to varying and lesser degrees, the sheer preponderance of them in the market place made them rather commonplace this aura of normality was backed up by ratings agencies which gave them the highest ratings. As a general rule, the normal banks appear to be fine, some have quite heavy liabilities, and others do not have much at all. The instruments alone cannot account for the whole problem, they come together to be a fairly small portion of the financial sectors clout. The initial shock should have been absorbed, if anything it wasn’t noticed by the mainstream media for quite a while after economists and accountants had realised what was happening, their focus was on the loans and the downturn and not the institutions which bought them second hand. Oddly enough it was soaked up. The first collapses were really a mix of ineptitude and something akin to complacency on managements part for not recapitalising when the warning lights were flashing or accepting buyouts or assistance and more institutional factors, not gauging the risk right even after the issue was well known (trading while insolvent is going to come up sometime soon) and complacency on the part of the Federal Reserve (although that point is arguable) as well as other gatekeeper institutions. What is interesting to note is that regulation did not play a significant part, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were regulated to within an inch of their lives and had something like 500 government servants watching and regularly reporting on their actions it wasn’t until Warren Buffet mentioned the collapsing positions of these two that the reports changed from rubber stamping and S&P, Moodies and Fitches downgraded them… the investment banks were handled by the Securities and Exchange Commission which continued to blithely assess the health of the industry as good till the first collapse… the banking watchdogs ignored the collapse of a few minor regional banks which were over geared and didn’t notice the gears of credit falling apart… and heck everyone missed the collapse of the interbank lending service… a series of cascading faults in the system, severe problems tend to be a series of seemingly unrelated events clicking together at just the right moment to cause maximum havoc.
So is there a reason to think the worst? Another Great Depression, doubtful. Even with this chaos, there has been no significant trend downwards in any of the indicators, industrial production remains high, job creation out of the financial sector remains quite high, and even in the financial sector the real damage is limited to only a select handful of institutions. The danger is in it spreading to other parts of the financial sector, and on into sectors of the economy, the first has happened, the collapse of interbank loans is terrible for the credit market that needs to be remedied, while the second is perhaps just beginning.
If anything the market is seeing to much risk, panic comes to mind, because of the speed few entities have had the time to properly assess the situation. So while the actual fallout of the subprime mortgages is relatively minor in the greater scheme of things, nobody has sat down and quite noticed that fact. The real problem is the fact that nobody can price the things, they are basically junk, which is why nobody is purchasing up vast numbers of these, and making new instruments minus the subprime portions typically only 20% the rest is otherwise healthy mortgages. Without a price, nobody is willing to buy them, and you end up with problems.
The government’s response to the crisis is to purchase all or most of those dodgy assets, whose toxic effect on the balance sheets of many firm is the problem and then to just do the sensible thing and wait them out since most of the loans are still good. The problem is this is this complex beyond belief, and is probably not the best means of doing a bail out, it’s a blunt instrument. Suggestions that have been floated including just buying up a slice of the pie of the assets, giving everyone a price to work off, allowing everyone to make estimates of what the real damage is instead of just blithely valuing them at near to zero. Other’s include nationalisation of failing banks, a terrible idea, the government won’t be able to hold them up, and is struck with a bunch of banks which should by all rights be allowed to die. Another is to have the government buy a stake in banks, 20% is the oft cited value, the problem is what’s colloquially called “zombie” firms, firms which might appear healthy on the balance sheet but are in-fact in dire financial crisis they just haven’t realised it yet.
This is not the only issue government is dealing with; the interbank service is going to undergo some changes to induce lending between banks. And the wider credit crunch is being attacked by the Federal Reserve, although there are some serious questions about what the banks are doing with the money they’ve already borrowed *cough hoarding cough*…
The markets should calm down eventually… any partisan sniping about who caused the crisis, will incur my wrath, I'll make sure to explain in full detail about the mechanics of banking and expect you to read it
Septimius Severus, Trajan, et al.
It was partly that, but then again how did the Romans get to the middle of the desert instead of hanging close to the rivers for supply, or to the Armenian and Atropatene mountains to help negate the cavalry advantage? Answer: Parthian double agents. As for Rostam, trying to learn history from the Shahnameh was an exercise in EPOCH FAIL. Got any good books to recommend on Iranology, with a bias towards the Parthian and Sassanian eras?
das
Regeneration In Process
had past experience, a more well-adapted military in general and (more, better) Asian auxiliaries in particular to draw upon.
It's better than nothing, but yes, I'm very angry at the Achaemenids failing to leave much in the way of literary heritage.
