Warrior General Games

Originally posted by
Uhh if you really hate having the government control more of the financial system over having 80 million people standing in a bread and soup line great depression style then you sir need to get your priorities straight.

I say it's the other way around......YOU have your priorities wrong.

A healthy free-market economic system CAN NOT continue to be propped-up by a government and our tax money. The bread and soup lines are going to happen anyway, we're just postponing it with this band-aid.

Have you been hearing about the increase of "tea parties" around the country? You think a bread and soup line is bad, Mindfreak? How about another civil war or revolution, sound better?

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Zeke:

What you don't seem to understand about AIG is that they are the re-insurers for virtually every other insurance company in this country.

What is a re-insurer? Simple:

Say I have a small local insurance company, and I have 5,000 in-force life insurance policies with an approximate total face value of $500,000,000 (roughly $100,000 apiece).

There's no way for me to have enough cash on hand to cover all, or even a significant percentage of those policies. I'm legally required to keep around 10% of the total value on hand - no big deal, I can use short-term credit swaps to keep that much around for the first few years while I build up premium reserves and re-invest capital.

However, what happens if more than 10% of those policies all of a sudden cash out? I'm screwed - and so are those insurers.

In order to prevent this, the federal government made rules a long time ago requiring that I also buy a re-insurance policy - literally, a low-premium guarantee from a really big company that indemnifies me against a run of policies needing to be paid off. The odds of this happening are low, but it has happened in the past, which is why the laws were put in place to protect policyholders.

AIG writes these reinsurance policies for everyone.

If they go under, suddenly no one has reinsurance. Where do you suppose any of those companies are going to be able to get reinsurance policies in a market like this?

Now, suddenly, the whole insurance industry collapses because no one can meet the regulatory requirements for re-insurance, and as soon as the public gets wind of this news, everyone stops buying insurance because they no longer have confidence in the ability of the insurer to pay their claims.

Except now we have another problem....

Most insurance companies do a lot more than life insurance.

The company I work for also does mortgage insurance. Mortgage insurance is basically like gap insurance on a car loan - it's a guarantee to the bank that if the borrower goes belly up, the insurance policy will pay off what the borrower should have put down on the house (traditionally 20%).

So without the REI, there's no one to write these policies, meaning banks will no longer be willing to approve mortgages with less than 20% down payment unless they're fed underwritten (FHA).

Suddenly the housing market is rocked even harder because people can't buy houses without a huge down payment (kind of like it was back in the 60's and prior)

See the dominoes starting to fall?

It gets worse.

Without REI, there is no insurance industry. Without the insurance industry, banks everywhere collapse. Without the banks, there is no credit. Without credit, every industry in the country screeches to a halt, and the Federal Government collapses in default.

So, if you're ready to embrace something far, far worse than the Great Depression - complete and total anarchy, with a nice side dish of food shortages and rioting, then by all means - let AIG crash and burn.

Some of us would prefer a systematic dismantling of AIG and the purging of their executive suites. Orderly, efficient, and without the nasty side effects of global economic collapse.

PS: You still don't seem to understand that we moved away from free market economics 100 years ago, and have never made a move back towards it.

Government regulation is ever-increasing in this country, funded by the very industries who would be regulated - because it makes cost-of-entry into their markets prohibitively high, which in turn reduces competition. We have de facto trusts and monopolies in many sectors because the federal government, in the name of "protecting" the public, has granted such trusts and monopolies.

You can thank Ronald Reagan for the monster that is AIG, and the monsters that are all these other trillion-dollar mergered Frankensteins - he's the one who gutted the Anti-Trust act and opened the door for hostile takeovers to happen - companies buying out competition that didn't want to be bought....

For me, it all boils down to this....

Social entitlement programs in the form of bailouts for rich corporations, and social welfare programs for the poor.

What's left in the middle is true capitalism, without the aid of a government crutch. This is why there has been an awakening across the U.S. in the form of these tea parties.

This is why you get upset when some one is buying a shopping cart full of steak with food stamps, while you have to eat hamburger and pay cash.

This is why you get upset when after companies received bailout money they had lavish hunting trips in england, spend the day at a ritzy spa, oh yeah, and received bonuses for crazy amounts of money, while you worry about saving for your childs education, worry about retirement, and hope you can maybe get some extra hours of overtime so you can afford to buy your wife a nice anniversary present or take the family on a weekend vacation.

The conservative middle class is highly agitated at the moment. I'm not sure how long it's going to last, but you can bet your ass heads are gonna roll come election time. That's why I decided to run for office, and I ask that anyone from the conservative middle class to join with me. Become a candidate for local, state, federal office. I don't care if you are democrat, republican, or independent. The seats of the congress are filled with men/women who have never had a job that required them to sweat. They don't know what it's like to work in a factory, to work outside in inclimate weather, to sit in a cubicle and take asinine phone calls, they have never felt the sting of a lay off, they've never had to turn in a car because they could no longer afford to make the payments, they don't know what it's like to have to choose between electricity, water, phone which one gets turned off. Now maybe they will never know what any of this feels like, but shouldn't our representatives be of the people? making decisions for the people...

Did you read anything I posted?

Anything at all?

You're just spouting off a bunch of Rush Limbaugh talking points without any understanding of the ramifications of your proposals.

I'm all for free market economics - but we have to take steps back towards free market policy in an orderly fashion, or we'll end up looking like Iraq.

In case you weren't aware, the first thing we did to the economic structure of Iraq after we removed Saddam Hussein was shut down all the state-run manufacturing. The foolish neo-conservatives in power here believed that this could create a capitalist paradise, an unregulated free market where corporations would move right in and fill the vacuum we created, and Iraq would become a prosperous nation....

Except the shock of near 100% unemployment caused an unintended side effect - the people whose jobs were displaced became angry, and joined the all-too-active anti-American revolt.

The same thing would happen here if you just "allowed" these massive financial institutions to collapse.

It has to come slowly, carefully, step by step, or chaos will ensue.

Blame Reagan? Wrong.

Many years have passed since Reagan was in office, so there was plenty of time to fix it if it was indeed bad. Reagan was an economic conservative and understood how the free market system was supposed to work in this country. No, Reagan didn't do it.....greed and political corruption did, plain and simple.

Then we had the economic liberal Democrats that FORCED banks to loan money to the "under-privileged" where they then couldn't pay...putting banks in the spot they're in. Yet another example why government intervention is a BAD THING. They had no business forcing private companies to make bad loans, all in the name of "equality"

Reagan understood what our founding fathers did.......government should be limited in our day-to-day lives. Yes, we have gotten away from that for a century now. So why continue? Why keep going with something that was wrong to do in the first place?

What you still don't get is.......increasing government intervention and control over our lives will lead to another revolution, and you're "insurance company crash" would have been but a small price to pay in retrospect.

You think these little "tea parties" are a joke? There are many Americans who know what is going on now with our governement is WRONG. And they will eventually do something about it.

The US government has got too big and powerful. It is inefficient at running a business. What they're doing now financially sets a bad precedent, and is just a band-aid that will make it worse for future generations.

But hey.....who cares about them, right? As long as we all get to enjoy our material things NOW is all that matters!

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I read it.

FYI, I think I have listened to Rush Limbaugh, maybe once. About 9 or 10 years ago. And that was only because he was on the same channel as Howard Stern.

It's not like AIG doesn't have subsidieries under it that can not be profitable. All we are doing is bankrolling a bankruptcy. We could have saved the bailout money and achieved the same result. Their financial products line, which from what I have read, was basically a bookie, didn't hedge his bets very well if at all, and that is what has brought it to it's knees.

I do agree, deregulation was a big mistake. I think any sensible person would agree with this. Corporations have shown time and time again that they cannot be trusted to self regulate.

Zeke - you are hopeless.

You're not reading what I'm typing, you're assigning a position to me because you assume I must be of that position if I disagree with you.

Here's a news flash: I'm a Libertarian. I wrote in Ron Paul on the last election ballot. I'm all about free market economics - but I also understand that we cannot just "pull the plug" on our current system and expect it to all be sunshine and flowers overnight.

Originally posted by
It has to come slowly, carefully, step by step, or chaos will ensue.

Now THAT is the joke. What steps are we doing? I'll tell you........the government is slowly gaining more and more control over our lives....... except in the AIG case it's happening fast.

And we ALL KNOW that the government will fuck up any kind of business they try running. History has shown this.

Originally posted by Zeke Woodson
Originally posted by

It has to come slowly, carefully, step by step, or chaos will ensue.

Now THAT is the joke. What steps are we doing? I'll tell you........the government is slowly gaining more and more control over our lives....... except in the AIG case it's happening fast.

Where did I say the USG is taking those steps?

I said that it had to be done in a slow, orderly fashion.

The first step is to get people into government that actually favor such a move.

And neither of the candidates for President we were offered last year qualified.

Originally posted by griffin8r
Originally posted by Zeke Woodson

Originally posted by


It has to come slowly, carefully, step by step, or chaos will ensue.

Now THAT is the joke. What steps are we doing? I'll tell you........the government is slowly gaining more and more control over our lives....... except in the AIG case it's happening fast.

Where did I say the USG is taking those steps?

I said that it had to be done in a slow, orderly fashion.

The first step is to get people into government that actually favor such a move.

And neither of the candidates for President we were offered last year qualified.



I didn't say you said it. I said it because it's already happening.....USG owns 80% of AIG now, and is already DICTATING to the employees who should get what money. What an obviously blatant abuse of power it is.

The same people that thought it best to give the money is now bitching that they spent it wrong? Unbelievable.

And then, of course, this just sets up every other so-called failing business to want bailout money, too.

Why should the USG stop with just AIG? Hell.....let's keep going with using our tax money until every business is owned and controlled by the government! Yay! Then we can call ourselves communist as the government decides what, when, where, why and how we buy!

Originally posted by Zeke Woodson
Why should the USG stop with just AIG? Hell.....let's keep going with using our tax money until every business is owned and controlled by the government! Yay! Then we can call ourselves communist as the government decides what, when, where, why and how we buy!

nah, communism doesn't turn a profit.

Originally posted by jaimevick
Originally posted by Zeke Woodson

Why should the USG stop with just AIG? Hell.....let's keep going with using our tax money until every business is owned and controlled by the government! Yay! Then we can call ourselves communist as the government decides what, when, where, why and how we buy!

nah, communism doesn't turn a profit.

It will for those in power.

Convenient for them, isn't it? /sarcasm