Meligheidstopic!

[TikTakTokTekTuk]

In- of uitklappen •

Stop Bashing Wall Street. Times Have Changed.

There's a perverse competition among some U.S. presidential candidates: Who can most loudly blame Wall Street for the problems of Main Street. They've got it wrong. Financial firms are doing more to help consumers, business and industry in America than they have in decades. And for the first time since the early years of the 21st century, global investors consider U.S. banks among the world's best.

One of the reasons the American economy is performing better than any of the largest in Asia and Europe is that its regulators have repaired the damage of the financial crisis and the worst recession since the Great Depression. Led by the Federal Reserve, they replaced incentives for reckless speculation with catalysts for old-fashioned credit creation backed by levels of capital that are unprecedented in modern times. Banks today are most willing to lend money since at least 1990. Perhaps the best measure of restored confidence in the financial system is the 63 percent of Americans who are within 7 percentage points of the all-time-high valuation of their homes in 2006.

Bouncing Back

All but ignored in the presidential debates this year is the record $1.06 trillion of loans to commercial and industrial firms by the largest U.S. banks, an amount that has increased for 21 consecutive quarters. That's a streak unequaled since 1985, when Ronald Reagan occupied the White House (and Bloomberg began compiling such data).

In its quarterly survey of senior loan officers, the Fed in January reported that banks have been willing lenders for 25 consecutive quarters, the longest period of commitment since President George H.W. Bush was president 26 years ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

That helps explain why investors for the first time since 2004 are paying a premium to purchase the shares of U.S. banks compared with their global peers on a price-to-book-value basis, according to Bloomberg data. The price-to-book ratio of the 24 major U.S. banks in the KBW Bank Index exceeded the comparable measure of 157 banks worldwide for the first time since President George W. Bush was re-elected.

Home mortgages now total $9.95 trillion after bottoming in 2014 after the recession. That amount is comparable to the easy-credit days of 2006, before the financial crisis. Today, in contrast, the mortgage market shows no signs of the leveraged lending that precipitated the housing bust and, if anything, is poised to keep growing.

The average home price, up 30 percent since 2012, reflects an increasingly robust outlook for housing, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. U.S. homeowner equity now amounts to 93 percent of the 2006 peak, which means Americans from coast to coast and North to South can look forward to recovering value lost from their homes when the market collapsed during the recession, Bloomberg data show.

If one excludes the period comprising the height of subprime lending, the financial crisis and ensuing recession, financing for consumers to homeowners is as good as it's ever been and getting better. Credit-card lines are increasing steadily while household debt payments as a percentage of disposable income have plummeted to 10.02 percent from 13.22 percent in 2007. The combination of healthier debtors while credit is expanding shows why banks are so willing to keep lending.

Debt Burden Down

The biggest banks today bear little resemblance to the risk-embracing juggernauts of a decade ago. The 24 big banks in the KBW index had the lowest total debt as a proportion of their assets since the data became available in 2002: 15.9 percent compared to 34 percent in 2004 and 30.6 percent in 2008. Estimated tangible common equity, the most conservative measure of a bank's capital, climbed to a record in 2015, says Alison Williams, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.

The convergence of U.S. banks' propensity to keep lending and global investors favoring them as best bets is reflected in the average ratio of nonperforming loans to total loans among the KBW Index banks. By the end of 2015, the ratio was 0.66 percent, the lowest since 2007 and a minuscule fraction of the 2.96 percent ratio reached in 2009. Banks also have reined in most of the proprietary trading in derivatives that brought them into conflict with their depositors. Their share of credit default swaps, for example, is down 75 percent to $14.6 trillion since 2007.

If anyone wonders what all this has to do with Main Street, the answer is revealed in the success of companies selling consumer products to Americans. Sales per share of U.S. consumer discretionary and consumer staples companies are at a record since data became available in 1990. The additional sales of consumer discretionary firms such as Amazon, Nike and Netflix, compared to consumer staple companies including Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart, is the widest since 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That suggests American consumers are healthy and getting healthier.

Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway has increased its holdings of Wells Fargo, Visa and U.S. Bancorp the past several years, recently told his shareholders that they should ignore much of what they're hearing from presidential candidates.

“As a result of this negative drumbeat, many Americans now believe that their children will not live as well as they themselves do,” Buffett wrote. “That view is dead wrong: The babies being born in America today are the luckiest crop in history.”

Buffett should know. It can only happen when Wall Street is backing Main Street.

http://bloombergview.com/articles/2016- ... ve-changed

hekel aan mensen die in discussies afkomen met een ellenlang artikel zonder enige verdere commentaar

Lees het artikel, ga erop in of zwijg. Zo gaat dat doorgaans. Je hebt daar mijn helpende hand niet voor nodig. Echt niet zo moeilijk. On topic nu.

En Pauper, ga er eens inhoudelijk op in in plaats van die man op z'n religie af te rekenen. Wtf, zeg.

In- of uitklappen •

As reckless as George W. Bush: Hillary Clinton helped create disorder in Iraq, Libya, Syria — and, scarier, doesn’t seem to understand how

As of the voting in various primaries last week and this week, Hillary Rodham Clinton has the surest way to the White House of any candidate who seeks the presidency from either of the major parties. She may not complete the journey, it is true. But even the most ardent Bernie Sanders supporters must now recognize that a lot of brush has been cleared from her path, and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue may once again be Clinton’s address.

It is time, then, to bear down on Hillary Clinton yet more than we have and determine just who she is and what a Clinton II presidency will be all about. Forget the frivolous attacks of rightists. Those who might be inclined to vote for Clinton are the responsible parties now. They must bear down on themselves, so that we can rid the forward-thinking side of our political conversation of its many encrustations—its mythologies, conventions, orthodoxies and the stale assumptions that have been placed over many years in some zone wherein they are taken to lie beyond questioning.

As you may surmise, I take the prospect of a Clinton II era to be a grave matter. It is not that she is a pathological variant of the political shape-shifter, to borrow a phrase from Charles Blow’s excellent column on the collapse of American ideals in Monday’s New York Times. It is Clinton’s consistency that should concern us most.

This is a dangerous figure, and I use the word advisedly, not rhetorically. Over eight years as First Lady, eight more as a New York senator and four as secretary of state, Clinton has proven repeatedly abusive of social order and careless of human life. It is time we face these facts and act accordingly. This holds especially for those given to false consciousness or lesser-of-evils arguments as they decide what to do next November 8.

I make special reference to American conduct abroad when I consider the prospect of a Clinton II presidency. Two reasons.

One, President HRC, in the event there is one, is destined to make very little difference in the domestic context. Thoroughly captive to the banks, corporations and special interests that have paved her political road for decades, Clinton will get next to nothing done in any of the countless domestic spheres wherein so much needs to be rectified. She has told us this herself, if subtly.

Some weeks ago, Michelle Alexander published an instantly celebrated piece in The Nation that demolished the reputation Clinton shares with her husband as an advocate for women, the disadvantaged and minority communities in America. I would not change a syllable of Alexander’s argument. We must attend to it closely; it should be an orientation document for those who will cast votes in this election. So should an essay by Liza Featherstone that The Nation also published recently.

Scrupulously diminished ambition, a narrow definition of the possible and a condescending dismissal of new thinking solely because it is new are elevated to principles in the Clinton campaign. One would have to be deaf not to hear “We can act only at the margins” as Candidate Clinton’s prudential leitmotif.

As anyone who looks out the window with clear eyes knows, this is effectively a prescription for continued regress. Clinton is another Nero. She simply does not register what time it is, and it is past time for incremental trench warfare with irrational rightists and brazen dismissals of the urgency of the present moment in American politics.

Clinton offers yet less prospect of substantive change on the foreign side, and here the need is very arguably more urgent. Much of the world is in chaos. Parts of it burn. South to north, east to west, many millions of desperate, displaced people swarm over it in search of safe haven. In several places there are regional wars, and global conflict could ignite in others. Societies and the earth itself have tolerances, just as machines do, and the present forms of violence and disorder now active against both far exceed these tolerances.

No one can seriously question Hillary Clinton’s influential role in creating the disorder that envelops us. Yet Clinton shows no sign of understanding our condition as it is or her place among its creators. The element of denial in her foreign policy platforms is self-evident. She brings no new tools to our crises and has no new thoughts. To assume that such tools are unavailable and that such thoughts cannot be thought is likely to prove a fatal mistake in this election.

Clinton manifests but one foreign policy premise: American primacy must be sustained at all cost. In this she is the liberal exceptionalist par excellence. Her tools to this end remain the Pentagon, the intelligence services, diplomacy by intimidation, bribery when it serves the desired purpose and straight-out coercion when it does not. Anyone who can add to this list is invited to use the comment box.

I am hard pressed to suggest what it will be like for Americans and all others to endure a Clinton II presidency. It is easy, on the other hand, to imagine that any forecasts one may come up with will fall short of the reality. But let us leave the precise future to the future, as we are likely to arrive in it soon enough.

In any case, we have another question before us now. It is this: How did we get here? How can so many of us eagerly await a president who has already proven more given to imperial adventure than any postwar leader other than Richard Nixon and Bush II—and far more hardened into ideological rigidity than Nixon was?

President Obama brought a new attitude to America’s conduct abroad, but he has done shockingly little to improve on Bush II’s record. In some respects he has worsened things, just as Bush II worsened what Clinton I handed him, and Clinton I worsened what Bush I handed him, and so on at least as far back as Kennedy. (And I exclude neither Johnson nor Carter.) There is a malign momentum in the conduct of American foreign policy that must be broken. In this regard Hillary Clinton holds out no prospect other than continuity.

Other questions: How can any of us fail to recognize that American foreign policy, never right since it was structured as imperial strategy in the late 19th century, is now a net contributor by a long way to an acute crisis of global disorder? How can anyone view Hillary Clinton in this context and come up with the idea of voting her into the White House?

I have already suggested my answers: mythologies, orthodoxies, muddled thinking, no thinking. And I have used the word “urgent.” Yes, it is urgent we get ourselves beyond these impediments to achieve a clear view of where we are and what to do about it.

A few weeks ago I read the following in an essay published in The Nation under the headline, “Why this socialist feminist is voting for Hillary.” It was written by Suzanna Danuta Walters, a sociologist at Northeastern University: “I want a woman president… I support her less for her specific political positions… than for the iconic value of electing the first woman president of the United States.”

I cannot be the only one brought up short on reading this contribution by a self-described socialist feminist. It is an indefensible passage by any rational measure, but it is not short of implications worth dwelling upon.

Let us consider a couple of these with Clinton’s foreign policy record in view.

Iconic value for whom exactly? In what tangible, useful forms will this value be realized in the immediacy of a world now in crisis, and how will this come to be? Is the rest of the world supposed to accept that it is on the receiving end of Clinton II’s agenda on the foreign side for no reason other than her gender? All the world beyond our spacious skies is merely the proscenium within which orthodox American feminism achieves its highest fulfillment?

It is bitter to conclude that the only answer available here is yes. And this is problematic two ways.

One, this kind of thinking reeks of American exceptionalism. We are invited to assume that the exercise of dominative American power is somehow in the natural order of things—and that providing Americans and all others self-deluded signifiers of our entitlement to moral leadership—independent of the actual consequences of our exercise of power—is humane, rational and wise. It is none of these.

The first of our two problems, then, concerns exceptionalism. And let us avoid any suggestion of ad hominem argument: In its implications Walters’ thinking—our icon is more important than your village or school or political order or life—is merely symptomatic of a consciousness that afflicts more or less all of us.

It is customary to identify our historically prevalent exceptionalist consciousness with right-wing reaction. This is an inadequate analysis. However much self-described progressive or socialists or liberals may hope to hold themselves above the idea that we are exceptional in the world, the consciousness is in us like a bad odor in a carpet. We are not sufficiently vigilant on this point—or, speaking for myself, I can say without hesitation I am not. And we have to address this now in the context of the Clinton candidacy. Her exceptionalism does not qualify her for “critical support,” or “lesser evil” consideration. In her case it is too consequential—too much the very wellspring of American policy as she will conduct it.

I used the phrase “orthodox American feminism.” By this I mean the purposely depoliticized feminism that emerged in the late-1960s and early 1970s—a feminism shorn of any critique of power and intent only on sharing it as it is constituted. Many years ago I spent a lot of time with veterans of the women’s movement in Japan—a savvy, salutary group with keen intellects. They dismissed the American phenomenon as “rights and careers” feminism—a good phrase. An old friend here in America with a similarly sharp mind and politics second to nobody’s calls it “Betty Friedan feminism.”

This is also a problem in need of address, given the prospect of a Clinton II government. The Clinton campaign reeks of it, and, like exceptionalism, it is a source of confusion and a cause of poor judgment, notably when carried into the foreign policy context. It gives us what we may now call “icon feminism.” To take a ready example of an icon, it gives us Madeleine Albright on camera defending the slaughter of half a million Iraqi children as “a tough decision but worth it.”

Naturally enough, we come back to Hillary Clinton’s “hard choices” and now her candidacy. And we find that another icon’s policies abroad are even more deleterious to women’s interests than many of her domestic positions.

The record is long and lately comes more to light. In the edition of CounterPunch published this week, Nick Alexandrov has a startling piece, “Hillary in Honduras,” on the fate of women after the 2009 coup that Clinton backed as secretary of state. In The Nation, Greg Grandin describes the “all-out assault on decent people,” who include indigenous women, by the Tegucigalpa putschists Hillary still calls “a unity government.”

Libya is an ongoing tragedy—which Clinton could have avoided has she not refused negotiations, it turns out. How many civilian casualties so far—and how many of those women and children? Clinton takes a highly antagonistic position with regard to the Rouhani government in Iran, so encouraging extremist conservatives. Ever been to Iran? It teems with sophisticated women who are happy to be Iranian but remain trapped in a political, social and cultural environment wherein there is no chance of fully realizing themselves.

The list goes on. I draw a lesson from it, as follows.

Feminism must be recognized and deployed as a subset of humanism. Any other understanding of it renders it impotent in the advance of its own cause. This is a great loss to everyone. Think what a superb, inspiring force feminism of a properly thought-out kind could be in international affairs. We have rarely, if ever, seen this anywhere. We will see nothing remotely resembling it from a Clinton II White House, to state the very obvious.

What we have and will get is what is now consolidated as the orthodoxy: It is a device for the achievement of power, which is an exceedingly cynical and offensive use of feminist thought. Or feminism assumes an iconic character, a preoccupation with imagery and signs. Icons are sacred images, of course—that is, objects of belief, evocations of feeling. They do not require thought, do not invite it and are not expressions of it.

Hillary Clinton is an icon, is she? Anyone who wants it can have my share. With her shocking inability to learn anything from the most horrific failures of American policy abroad, she bears a big lesson, this one can say:

If Americans are to get anything of use to the world done in the 21st century, they must stop feeling and believing and begin thinking. With Clinton II so close to becoming a reality, the time for this shift in consciousness, profound and difficult as it may be, is now.

[Meutr]

Hondje die wat inhoudelijks toevoegt aan het topic. Ik mag mezelf op de borst kloppen.

[Wup]

* Hier stond een grappige post over Meutr, die verwijderd is door de strenge censuur. *

[Meutr]

Hahaha!

[Wup]

Hahaha!

Toelichting: Het weglachen van censuur vind ik ook grappig.

[Daan]

Hahaha!

Haha kan jij niet eens "is verwijderd" goed schrijven?

[TikTakTokTekTuk]

Meutr is op een censuurstreak vandaag

[Wup]

Hahaha!

Haha kan jij niet eens "is verwijderd" goed schrijven?

Verbetert. Domme Meudr.

[Meutr]

Hahaha!

Haha kan jij niet eens "is verwijderd" goed schrijven?

Wup schreef dat.

[Wup]

Zou ik ook zeggen.

[Wup]

Als dit allemaal klopt en het door gaat hoop ik inderdaad dat er niet een heel nieuw Jmod team komt in China die de boel gaat verkloten.

Doet mij aan ADO Den Haag denken. Die hebben nog nooit een cent gezien. En maar groot doen! En zakendoen met een chinees is het zelfde als NIETS op papier zetten hier. Kortom ik maak mij grote zorgen. En voor wat? Om een zak geld? Als jij morgen 50.000 euro krijgt is ook zo op. Beetje dit beetje dat, en de meeste mensen hebben na een tijdje een negatief vermogen. Het is allemaal korte termijn politiek!


Reminds me of ADO Den Haag. Who have never seen a penny. And just doing great for the public, its all show! And doing business with a Chinese is the same as NOTHING to get on paper here. It worrys me a lot. And for what? For a bag of money? If tomorrow you receive 50,000 euros is also gone soon. Little bit of this ore that and its gone. And most of the people have negative equity after a while. It's all short-term politics!

[Zeekoe]

Wou het juist posten. Schitterende comment!

[Daan]

Kerel nadert de 50 ook.

[Yves W]

Waarom ook die verschrikkelijke Engelse vertaling erbij?

[Kipcorn]

verjaardagstopic

Hoe leeg dit topic is illustreert goed hoe dood ltf aan het gaan is.

illustreert ook het aantal hersencellen in je heufd

[TikTakTokTekTuk]

Haha wat een grapjas, die tiktak!

[Eend]

Graag willen we benadrukken dat ook in dit topic de forumregels van toepassing zijn. We wensen jullie er dus aan te herinneren dat beledigende, schunnige en uitlokkende berichten en quotes tegen de regels zijn.

De quotes dienen uiteraard van op dit forum te komen en het is ook handiger en leuker voor iedereen als je direct ook even linkt naar de originele post, opdat er een context aanwezig is.

Onthoud ook dat dit al eens eerder mislukt is, indien het weer nodig zou zijn, verdwijnt dit topic gewoon terug.

Ter herinnering.

[Daan]

Kerel, aan je activiteit te zien heb je totaal geen idee meer hoe het er hier tegenwoordig aan toe gaat. Je hebt net zo'n beetje de mooiste post van het jaar weggehaald, en letterlijk niemand maakte er een probleem van. De personen die in die quote genoemd werden zitten toch al jaren niet meer op het forum, dus niemand voelde zich aangevallen.
Heel jammer dit Eend.

[Sam]

Eend jonge wat doe je nou!

[Zeekoe]

Helemaal akkoord met Daan, lol. Zelf nooit iets posten en nu na maanden inactiviteit even de stadswacht gaan uithangen. Sad.