BF2S Forums Estonia True Paradise?

Shocking wrote:

Alright. In the banking crisis there were multiple banks across multiple countries that had to be bailed out, you'd say that letting them fail was worth it if that meant having the other corporations realise that they need to be more careful with their investments.

I'm sure it would have sparked a lot of public outrage though, these companies are so enormous that major projects all throughout the world would come to a standstill. Nevermind people losing all their savings, etc. In today's culture people won't accept something like that, especially not the savings part. What would the effects have been if they did fail?

What people losing their savings? In the United States all deposits up to $500,000 are insured against loss. It makes a fabulous feelings-based talking point but it's completely untrue.

Why has our recovery been so sluggish? Much of it has to do with overburdened corporations being bailed out instead of failing. They've been allowed to shamble on as zombies while generating zero growth. You have to hit bottom before you can start to recover and our economies haven't been allowed to do that. So, we maintain our high unemployment rates, our zombie corporations, and expect things to turn around if only our government dumps many more trillions into the economy in order to give it a boost. It's failed economic policy but the true believers will keep throwing good money after bad and wring their hands because they don't understand why it's not working.

What would've happened if banks were allowed to fail? Would their assets disappear? No. They would've been bought by others. Sure, some of it would've ended up in the hands of other banks, but a lot of it would've been split up and sold off to smaller companies who would've now had a path to growth of their own. Sometimes, in order to get new growth, you have to burn down the forest because it's full of dead trees and prohibits other life from sprouting.

Jay wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

Jay wrote:

Now, a real example would be a corporation itself as a microcosm of the economy as a whole. I think we can all agree that large corporations that rise and fall and dip and veer all over the place wouldn't be a very good place to invest money, yes? People tend to want stability so they can invest with confidence. The same goes for unfettered markets. For some reason you, and people like you, expect unfettered markets to be some wild west gold rush kind of boom with constant highs and lows. Well, has that changed with regulation or do we just get bigger booms and bigger depressions?

Free markets are inherently stable because the people that populate them tend to prefer order to chaos. They're self policing without a bunch of bureaucrats stepping in to 'save people from themselves'.

You didn't read 'Liars Poker' or 'The Big Short' then?

The people who populate the 'free market' are fuckwads like everyone else.
The don't want 'order over chaos', they want a fat windfall for themselves and to get out before they're found out.

Was I talking about fly by night employees during a boom? No, I was talking about investors. Investors want stability and a path to growth. Bailouts encourage the very behavior you're talking about since employees then feel they can take as big a risk as they want without repercussions.

Huh ... investors want as much gain as they can in as short a time as possible ...

Varegg wrote:

Jay wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

You didn't read 'Liars Poker' or 'The Big Short' then?

The people who populate the 'free market' are fuckwads like everyone else.
The don't want 'order over chaos', they want a fat windfall for themselves and to get out before they're found out.

Was I talking about fly by night employees during a boom? No, I was talking about investors. Investors want stability and a path to growth. Bailouts encourage the very behavior you're talking about since employees then feel they can take as big a risk as they want without repercussions.

Huh ... investors want as much gain as they can in as short a time as possible ...

no investors want long term growth.

Jay wrote:

What people losing their savings? In the United States all deposits up to $500,000 are insured against loss. It makes a fabulous feelings-based talking point but it's completely untrue.

Jay wrote:

Why has our recovery been so sluggish? Much of it has to do with overburdened corporations being bailed out instead of failing. They've been allowed to shamble on as zombies while generating zero growth. You have to hit bottom before you can start to recover and our economies haven't been allowed to do that. So, we maintain our high unemployment rates, our zombie corporations, and expect things to turn around if only our government dumps many more trillions into the economy in order to give it a boost. It's failed economic policy but the true believers will keep throwing good money after bad and wring their hands because they don't understand why it's not working.

Didn't know. Yes, it's frequently brought up (the savings thing). To be honest with you economics is the one subject I know very little about, so I'm just taking what I hear/read on the news and trying to see the reasoning behind it. I'm trusting on that the people in the federal reserve aren't idiots and most likely, they aren't.

How much of a guarantee is there for an insurance company to be able to deal with the blow of many corporations failing at the same time, though? I see the corporate world as being some sort of a Greece-Europe thing. There's too many mutual investments and interests depending on eachother meaning that if one fails the other gets dragged down with it, or, at least, a major part of its investments. That has been the main talking point; preventing a chain reaction.

Jay wrote:

What would've happened if banks were allowed to fail? Would their assets disappear? No. They would've been bought by others. Sure, some of it would've ended up in the hands of other banks, but a lot of it would've been split up and sold off to smaller companies who would've now had a path to growth of their own. Sometimes, in order to get new growth, you have to burn down the forest because it's full of dead trees and prohibits other life from sprouting.

Well, this is something I can agree with wholeheartedly.

Varegg wrote:

FEOS wrote:

Varegg wrote:

Quite

How about right up until Sep 1939?

Yeah ... you could actually stretch that some time into 1942, amazingly how slave labour can give you a boost ...

But as mentioned earlier you can't isolate the start of a boom without taking the end result into consideration ... and the end result of Nazi Germany is evaluated long ago ... the Estonian end result will be evaluated some time in the future ... and that without the use of slave labour I might add

I dont think that you can say that Germany lost the war because of their economic policies. If anything the only reason Germany got anywhere at all in WWII was because of the strength of its economy. Im not by any means suggesting the Nazis are something we should all strive to be, not in the slightest, Ive just studied the shite out of them and they were stupidly successful pre war. Hell till 1942 they were still hugely popular but shit hit the fan and Hitler started making really not very clever decisions.

Germany suffered arguably the worst from the great depression because their whole country was surviving on US loans to pay their war debts (to the US lol, and the rest of the EU) so when all the loans were called in they were stuffed. The unemployment and hyperinflation are well documented and certainly worse than happened elsewhere at the time. Yet they fought a very successful war on numerous fronts until '42. With demonstrably better technology than any of their competitors.

You can very validly criticize the Nazis for a huge long list of truly awful things however you cannot deny the success of their economic policies or their popularity.

Shocking wrote:

Jay wrote:

What people losing their savings? In the United States all deposits up to $500,000 are insured against loss. It makes a fabulous feelings-based talking point but it's completely untrue.

Jay wrote:

Why has our recovery been so sluggish? Much of it has to do with overburdened corporations being bailed out instead of failing. They've been allowed to shamble on as zombies while generating zero growth. You have to hit bottom before you can start to recover and our economies haven't been allowed to do that. So, we maintain our high unemployment rates, our zombie corporations, and expect things to turn around if only our government dumps many more trillions into the economy in order to give it a boost. It's failed economic policy but the true believers will keep throwing good money after bad and wring their hands because they don't understand why it's not working.

Didn't know. Yes, it's frequently brought up (the savings thing). To be honest with you economics is the one subject I know very little about, so I'm just taking what I hear/read on the news and trying to see the reasoning behind it. I'm trusting on that the people in the federal reserve aren't idiots and most likely, they aren't.

How much of a guarantee is there for an insurance company to be able to deal with the blow of many corporations failing at the same time, though? I see the corporate world as being some sort of a Greece-Europe thing. There's too many mutual investments and interests depending on eachother meaning that if one fails the other gets dragged down with it, or, at least, a major part of its investments. That has been the main talking point; preventing a chain reaction.

Jay wrote:

What would've happened if banks were allowed to fail? Would their assets disappear? No. They would've been bought by others. Sure, some of it would've ended up in the hands of other banks, but a lot of it would've been split up and sold off to smaller companies who would've now had a path to growth of their own. Sometimes, in order to get new growth, you have to burn down the forest because it's full of dead trees and prohibits other life from sprouting.

Well, this is something I can agree with wholeheartedly.

The FDIC is a federal agency. The government is the insurance company in this case.

I think it was to do with the decision that the best place to inject the money was into the banking system. Im sure the idea was to free up credit again, however it didnt work as the banks hung onto the money so a lot of it didnt get injected at all.

Shocking wrote:

That's confusing, then why did they bail companies out if the country itself has already insured everyone for the damages..

Why did former lifelong bankers in the fed decide to bail out banks?

Shocking wrote:

It wasn't just banks though, GM too

GM is the biggest source of union jobs in the nation. Dems bailed out their voting base with GM and the first stimulus which really did nothing more than prop up union jobs in state governments. Pure politics.

Hitler completely fucked it up by disallowing Manstein from using retreat as a viable tactic.

Overall they had better training, a better chain of command, better commanders in general and even better tech. As much as people hate Nazi Germany they conquered Europe in record time.

Jay wrote:

Shocking wrote:

It wasn't just banks though, GM too

GM is the biggest source of union jobs in the nation. Dems bailed out their voting base with GM and the first stimulus which really did nothing more than prop up union jobs in state governments. Pure politics.

Jay wrote:

Why did former lifelong bankers in the fed decide to bail out banks?

Could it be that they figured bailing out the banks would be cheaper rather than paying off all sorts of damages?

Jay wrote:

The mk3 and mk4 tanks that germany invaded france with were technologically inferior to the renaults they faced. Germanys tech superiority was a myth put forth by the allies to explain away their defeat.  It  was simply movement and tactics that  prevailed.

Majority of them were panzer I & II's if I remember correctly, in France germanly definitely won with superior tactics. The nr. III & IV tanks were quite evenly matched with the british tanks, although they didn't pack as much of a punch and weren't as heavily armored they were a lot more mobile. They didn't make up a majority of the tanks in the war though.

The airplanes of the wehrmacht were I believe better than any contemporaries. Messerschmidt 109s were really good.

Once the Tigers started rolling out in the middle of the war these posed a real problem for any allied armor. Their engines failed all the time but even when standing still there was no way to get to it as it simply outranged and outgunned any other tank.


edit; lol germanly... germany

Last edited by Shocking (2011-06-21 07:26:36)