Joe Biden: U.S. President

Trump is awful, most people get this

The left right divide, culture war, partisanship, this isn’t an illusion. Sure, boiling everything down to a simple binary all the time isn’t accurate or useful. I don’t think most people really get this, I think most people either tune out or root for their team.

Anyways, ratfuckery all around, was the point. On the pro Trump side and the anti Trump side, and any non aligned interests as well.

That’s true, but I think as far as the left/right establishment is concerned the culture war is something to be used to divide people and distract from what the left/right establishment is doing in Washington.

The establishment serves a higher cause than any left/right political divide and that’s why the right wing establishment sided with the left wing establishment candidate. Trump may be an asshole, but that’s not why they promised to vote for the other side.

I keep saying this but it is the single biggest perceptual shift that once really seen can’t be unseen and everything else about politics falls right into place. Honestly, :grinning: give it a go and after a while you will be kicking yourself and wondering why you didn’t see it sooner.

You need to get past the “that can’t possibly be true” in your mind, but, hey, no harm trying a thing on. :wink:

Sure, by some. Post occupy wall street, when politicians should have done what Biden is now calling for. But there are also plenty of true believers. It isn’t as simple as either or

Most people serve themselves, i would say

Doesn’t mean he is worth defending, either, let alone voting for.

You can’t read my mind and don’t really know what I see or think. You need to get past this idea that from a few quick lines Ibthrow up here ir there you can suss out all of my beliefs and the underlying thought processes. It’ll be a difficult but powerful paradigm shift for you, if you can handle it :wink: give it a go :grin:

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Actually I can. It’s like a football manager taking over a club and sitting at the bottom of the league and having the worst stats known to man and claiming “at least I’m better than the previous guy”. On what kind of basis is such a claim even being made?

Maybe the previous manager was a shitty person, maybe he cheated on his wife and did all sorts of despicable things and on that basis the new manager is better, but if the stats and position in the league tell a different story, well as a manager he is not better, quantifiably and factually.

Which is the case for Biden on almost every quantifiable measurable metric there is. But hey, he’s a nice guy and Trump sucked, ok, if you say so. I don’t actually think Biden is a nice guy, but everyone is entitled to their opinion on that.

Going back to the article I posted, I think it is better to ask Congress to do something about executives at failed banks than to roll back banking regulations. I actually posted a specific article about a specific issue.

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You did, but they never hold the banking executives to account, If we use the 2008 banking crisis as a reference, there won’t be much done to hold the executives to account. Would be great if they did and I’ll be the first to be pleasantly surprised if they do, but talk is cheap.

Frank is a good guy

On a positive note:

Ned Price was talking about this last week. It’s a line in the sand being respected, so far.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov tweeted Saturday that the deal would remain in effect for the longer, four-month period. But Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Russian news agency Tass that Moscow “agreed to extend the deal for 60 days.”

“Any claim that it’s prolonged for more than 60 days is either wishful thinking or deliberate manipulation,” Russia’s deputy ambassador to the U.N., Dmitry Polyansky, said.

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Not for Taiwan, no. His nice guy approach unfortunately just allowed the grabbers to keep grabbing.

Guy

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Taiwan wasn’t really in my radar back then. One wonders what he’d be like given the current year state of the world

“The law limits the administration’s authority to hold executives responsible,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. “When banks fail due to mismanagement and excessive risk taking, it should be easier for regulators to claw back compensation from executives, to impose civil penalties, and to ban executives from working in the banking industry again. Congress must act to impose tougher penalties for senior bank executives whose mismanagement contributed to their institutions failing.”

SVB’s “excessive risk taking” was buying US Treasuries. If it had just kept its money in cash it wouldn’t have lost 2 billion dollars when it had to sell its low interest government bonds to cover withdrawals by startups in need of operating capital.

Maybe the executives should diversify their risk, not just their executives :laughing:

Diversifying risk and excessive risk taking aren’t the same thing.

Right, my meaning was they are opposite

Their excessive risk taking was investing in long term treasuries at historic lows, to eek out higher returns over short term issues, knowing that rates and bond prices have an inverse relationship and that rates were likely to rise, and doing so without apparent hedges. Balancing yields and prices is something even beginner. bond investors do (it’s basically lesson 1 you need to learn about bond prices).

Right. SVB should have stayed in cash until interest rates rose. Too bad they listened to economists and the Fed who were claiming that low interest rates were the new normal:

Low Rates Were Meant to Last. Without Them, Finance Is In for a Rough Ride.

WASHINGTON — If a number defined the 2010s, it was 2 percent. Inflation, annual economic growth, and interest rates at their highest all hovered around that level — so persistently that economists, the Federal Reserve and Wall Street began to bet that the era of low-everything would last.

That bet has gone bad. And with the implosion of Silicon Valley Bank, America is beginning to reckon with the consequences. . . .

The bank’s mistake was a bad — and ultimately lethal — one. But it wasn’t wholly unique.

Many banks are holding big portfolios of long-term bonds that are worth a lot less than their original value. U.S. banks were sitting on $620 billion in unrealized losses from securities that had dropped in price at the end of 2022, based on Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation data, with many regional banks facing big hits. . . .

Adding in other potential losses, including on mortgages that were extended when rates were low, economists at New York University have estimated that the total may be more like $1.75 trillion. Banks can offset that with higher earnings on deposits — but that doesn’t work if depositors pull their money out, as in Silicon Valley Bank’s case. . . .

In their economic forecasts a year ago, even after months of accelerating inflation, Fed officials projected that interest rates would peak at 2.8 percent before falling back to 2.4 percent in the longer run.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/business/economy/interest-rates-silicon-valley-bank.html

1 - Rates are still low. That’s how bad they sucked that they got caught by this.
2 - You’d think they might have 1 or 2 smart people that could understand this.

Judge Stephen Higginson, a nominee of former President Barack Obama, wrote the main dissenting opinion. “For the wrong reasons, our court correctly concludes that we do have jurisdiction,” Higginson wrote. “But contrary to a dozen federal courts — and having left a government motion to stay the district court’s injunction pending for more than a year — our court still refuses to say why the President does not have the power to regulate workplace safety for his employees.”

I’ll go with because “government” is an idea, not a building. He’s not a CEO, he’s the president. It’s a strange argument.

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Bloody Joe Biden.

And yet, nothing has been said really. Thanks Joe. Not feeling safe here.