Unqualified Offerings

Quote of the Day

23 Responses to “Quote of the Day”

1. Comment by Hesiod —
   March 17, 2009 @ 9:27 am

   I’m a hedge fund manager, and I’m OK
   I sleep all night and I work all day!

   I make dumb trades. I eat my lunch.
   I go to the lavatory.
   On Wednesdays I go shoppin’
   And have buttered scones for tea.

2. Comment by Dave Allan —
   March 17, 2009 @ 12:43 pm

   For every quote, a counter quote:

   More than a negligible amount of the blame for the mortgage meltdown can be traced back to multiculturalism: government-mandated affirmative-action lending, demographic change, illegal immigration, and the mind-numbing effects of political correctness.

   - Steve Sailer

3. Comment by Seward —
   March 17, 2009 @ 12:59 pm

   I would argue that any judgments this close in time to the event (heck, any event) will generally be subject to a lot of confirmation bias.

   That would include even a free market view – such as my own.

4. Comment by strasmangelo jones —
   March 17, 2009 @ 1:14 pm

   More than a negligible amount of the blame for [INSERT BAD THING HERE] can be traced back to multiculturalism

   I knew black people were somehow to blame for all this! Thanks again, Steve Sailer!

5. Comment by Thoreau —
   March 17, 2009 @ 1:37 pm

   I can’t believe that we’re going to blame a banking crisis on anyone other than the Jews. I mean, why go for the high-hanging fruit?

6. Comment by Barry —
   March 17, 2009 @ 2:09 pm

   Dave Allan, are you actually trying to use a Steve Sailer quote to *defend* something?

7. Comment by bartkid —
   March 17, 2009 @ 4:38 pm

   Further evidence of the Greater Fool theory of investing: You always need a greater fool on whom to unload toxic assets.

   And women are no fools.

8. Comment by Jennifer —
   March 17, 2009 @ 6:46 pm

   I read the “visit to Iceland” story a couple weeks ago, I think on metafilter, and most of the commenters said the guy’s “Icelandic men are brutish idiots” thing was bullshit. Sounds more like “the guy has the ability to seriously rub people the wrong way.”

   You need not subscribe to any gender theory to think “People will do stupid things when their actions are divorced from any responsibility for the consequences.”

9. Comment by Thoreau —
   March 17, 2009 @ 7:07 pm

   Judging from the way that dumbass macho dudes are able to get laid, I’d say that for every foolish man there is an equally foolish and oppositely gendered woman.

10. Comment by Gary Farber —
    March 17, 2009 @ 10:22 pm

    “For every quote, a counter quote:”

    Except that Nancy provides a long series of substantive quotes and substantive points.

    You just make up an unsupported assertion.

    She wins.

11. Comment by sab —
    March 18, 2009 @ 5:04 am

    So why is it that on Cash Cab, it’s always the women who go for the double or nothing at the end, while the men walk away with the money they’ve already won. My husband told me this and I thought he was crazy, but I’ve been watching with him for a month, and he’s right.

12. Comment by dhex —
    March 18, 2009 @ 9:26 am

    “Except that Nancy provides a long series of substantive quotes and substantive points.”

    really?

    the inanity of her comments in no way detract from the deep shittiness that is steve sailer and the rest of the nativist cackheads, mind you. but still. they’re still playing pocket pool with their preconceptions.

    which is fine, i mean, that’s what people want. who am i to stand in the way of what people want?

13. Comment by Jennifer —
    March 18, 2009 @ 10:35 am

    I wonder if this genitalia-obsessed idiot also believes the first Great Depression would’ve been a lot worse had women not been granted the vote in 1920? Was Leona Helmsley’s insane greed partially tempered by her X chromosomes?

    Except that Nancy provides a long series of substantive quotes and substantive points.

    Is my script-blocker keeping those hidden from view? I only saw where she wrote three or four sentences of her own; the rest is cut-and-pasted from other sources. And she is both a sexist and a racist, to say that one group is more or less greedy and irresponsible than the other.

    Before the bubble collapsed, the poster child for the housing bubble was the California migrant strawberry picker who (this is true) took out a $750,000 mortgage despite making only $25,000 a year. But I sure as hell wouldn’t point to him as proof that Latinos are responsible for the mess.

14. Comment by Stu —
    March 18, 2009 @ 11:35 am

    Jennifer @ 13

    It’s interesting how nobody ever blames the banker for giving the “California migrant strawberry picker” a loan he couldn’t afford. You should consider the possibility that a migrant worker is not all that financially sophisticated and a banker convinced him that he could afford that house.

    The real problem is that bankers and mortgage brokers had an incentive to give people loans they knew there was no chance of them repaying; they were paid on commission (a larger commission for a larger loan) and the loans they made were sold off to other banks and securitized, removing the risk from their own institutions. That’s the root of the problem, not the people taking out the loans.

15. Comment by dhex —
    March 18, 2009 @ 12:41 pm

    “That’s the root of the problem, not the people taking out the loans.”

    what i don’t get is why can’t it be both?

    isn’t the inability to do the most basic of maths a serious problem? perhaps even more serious than human greed? after all, if you can do basic maths, no idiot loan officer is going to be able to convince you that 1 + 1 = 4000

    what about the relatively rich idiots who did the same damn thing on a much larger scale? were they all fooled?

16. Comment by dhex —
    March 18, 2009 @ 1:32 pm

    just to clarify a bit (or perhaps muddy), there’s no excuse for fraud, and motherfuckers should be prosecuted in those cases.

    but i get the feeling – call it women’s intuition by proxy – that the vast majority of shitty loans involved not fraud but stupidity. i notice that in every sad sack “oh lord i am going to up and lose this house” story there’s a common refrain:

    “i did not fully read the paperwork that i signed”*

    imagine that! dunno about you guys, but i’m shocked.

    i bet they also said “at least i’m not throwing away my money by renting” a lot, too.

    * the common rejoinder to my coldheartedness, of course, is that “reading complicated documents are hard”.

17. Comment by Stu —
    March 18, 2009 @ 4:30 pm

    dhex-

    Do you know every detail of your mortgage agreement? If you don’t have a mortgage, how about the terms of your credit cards? That stuff is complicated. Most people don’t understand that stuff; that’s why the banker is supposed to tell you what you can and can not afford. And it’s not like the the bankers were telling people that “1+1=4000″; people went into the bank and said, “I make $40,000 a year, how big of a loan can I afford?” And when they don’t understand the terms of the mortgage agreement, they ask…the banker! And if the banker misleads (or flat out lies) to the customer, how would the customer know? I think that the onus is on the banker, not the person taking out the loan, because the banker is supposed to be the professional. Of course there were some customers that know that what they were doing was fraudulant, but I very much doubt that it is the majority of the people who are now in trouble.

    I wish there were data available so we didn’t have to speculate, but my scenario (see comment 14) seems much more plausible to me than an army of consumers all of sudden deciding to commit mortgage fraud.

18. Comment by Josh —
    March 18, 2009 @ 5:39 pm

    When Lebovitz says “This suggests,” she means “suggests,” not “shows” or even “indicates”: she’s just speculating that there could be a macho culture that influenced the meltdown. That’s what people on blogs do.

19. Comment by Nancy Lebovitz —
    March 18, 2009 @ 8:13 pm

    Here’s a plausible take on the slamming into each other issue from metahacker:

    The first time I took my wife to NYC (where I was raised), she got consistently run over by people on the street. I ended up having to literally tow her behind me as I led her down the sidewalk.

    People on New York streets don’t plow into each other normally, so I was curious. It turns out that the Boston paradigm (where she’s from) is to give other walkers a wide berth, and generally yield to people on the wrong side of the sidewalk. (This parallels traffic.) There isn’t room for this in New York, so the paradigm there is for each perosn to each adjust a half-person’s width in the split second before impact. Lacking this training, she didn’t adjust, and so kept colliding.

    I have to wonder if Mr. Lewis encountered this sort of problem; failing to fit in with the flow, he decided that everyone was out to hit him, and upon testing his theory, it turned out they wouldn’t shy away from doing so. This in turn made me worry about his conclusions in the rest of the article, if he couldn’t be bothered to get to the bottom of this situation.

    Jennifer, thanks for pointing me at the metafilter discussion. I’m going to be giving Lewis’ social commentary a lot less credence in the future, and generally be less trusting of short-term traveler’s tales.

    No thanks for the insults, of course.

    That big study I cited is at least intriguing, but I don’t know how they defined “traded less sensibly”.

    Josh, that’s exactly it.

20. Comment by Glaivester —
    March 18, 2009 @ 11:32 pm

    It’s interesting how nobody ever blames the banker for giving the “California migrant strawberry picker” a loan he couldn’t afford. You should consider the possibility that a migrant worker is not all that financially sophisticated and a banker convinced him that he could afford that house.

    The point isn’t tp blame the migrant laborer. The point is that the whole system was shifted (a) to encourage the banker to make that loan, (b) to tell the laborer that he had a right to that unaffordable house and that any doubts that he could afford it were caused by racists, and (c) to discourage anyone with regultory oversight from pointing out that the loan was a stupid idea, because to say such would be racist.

    With most racial issues where I take an un-PC stand, my targets of derision are not minorities, but “anti-racists.”

21. Comment by Jim Henley —
    March 19, 2009 @ 7:59 am

    With most racial issues where I take an un-PC stand, my targets of derision are not minorities, but “anti-racists.”

    And this is why I have a certain amount of hope for you! Though it’s tempered by the knowledge that people tend to get more bitter as they age.

22. Comment by dhex —
    March 19, 2009 @ 9:49 am

    “Do you know every detail of your mortgage agreement? If you don’t have a mortgage, how about the terms of your credit cards?”

    since i don’t have a mortgage i’ll have to go with the credit card example: you bet your fucking ass i do. that’s why i’ve never carried a balance. i’m one of those fucking assholes who actually read the whole credit card agreement and looked up the stuff i didn’t understand! being a complete fuckface i decided to assume that a big company with lots of lawyers would automatically place me within terms that were more advantageous for them than i.

    yes, these things are complicated. and “not fun” (TM) not so much as the tax code perhaps, but certainly within the same universe of layered absurdity and penalty. (i.e. the day i learned the irs can compound penalties *daily* was eye opening, to say the least.)

    but when you say “I think that the onus is on the banker, not the person taking out the loan, because the banker is supposed to be the professional.” i think about how poorly someone would fare with that attitude going into, for example, an irs audit. or talking to the police. or into a best buy and following their salespeople’s “professional” advice. it’s a formula for getting fucked over.

    i don’t think i buy the idea that people were getting loans because the lenders were afraid of being called racist. that’s vaulting over the tried and true concepts of greed and risk-taking.

23. Comment by dhex —
    March 19, 2009 @ 9:56 am

    “I wish there were data available so we didn’t have to speculate, but my scenario (see comment 14) seems much more plausible to me than an army of consumers all of sudden deciding to commit mortgage fraud.”

    well, there will (most likely) be an army of data in the future.

    but being an idiot – i.e. being incapable of accurately assessing your monthly costs – isn’t the same thing as mortgage fraud by any measure, though there’s no doubt a bit of that floating around as well. the two extremes we’re positing (fraud and stupidity) also have quite a few middle points that include bad luck and a more general biting off more than one can chew category that floats somewhere between self-deception and rolling the dice. i have sympathy for bad luck, no so much people figuring on being ok with hocking 70% of their monthly income, which seems to have been a common tactic across the income spectrum. (there was a wapost story on this last year in some virginia county where the median housing cost was 750k and more than 50% of the homes were in foreclosure)

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