The more I read about the housing crisis and the eventual collapse of the financial markets, the less faith I have in our masters of the universe.
The newest bits of my reading are around the failure of the credit rating agencies like Moodys and S&P to assess risk because of market pressures. First read this.
There’s a lot of great stuff in there, but I’d encourage you to read the Moody’s town hall transcript somewhere near the end to see how they passed the buck and tried to minimize their role in the market collapse. Read up in Frank Raiter’s testimony about how S&P had better models for rating that simply weren’t used because they wouldn’t make them more money. Read up on how Moody’s CEO explains that models aren’t everything, and really it’s a bunch of smart people making guesses. Also consider the testimony of Jerome Fons who talks about how Moody’s was rating subprime financial instruments on basically no information.
As Jerome points out, current rating agencies have a huge conflict of interest and consider debt issuers rather than investors as their customers.
I don’t know why I keep reading about this stuff. It’s just going to make my blood pressure go up.
Well, one way Arizona could deal with its budget problems is by firing sheriff Joe. He’s cost us over $41 million so far in lost lawsuits.
Yes, but he is likely saving you billions in welfare and medicaid payments. The government shouldn’t be building a fence, a minefield would work much better. Most of these folks are not US citizens; they don’t have the same rights as citizens.
I’m just going to go ahead and assume that you’ve looked up the actual medicare and welfare costs of non-citizens. The numbers I’ve seen are in the hundreds of millions each year for all illegal aliens, not just the ones he’s arresting. I’m also going to assume that you’re balancing that against the many benefits (however illegal) to our economy that undocumented and insanely cheap laborers offer. If we’re going to make a purely economical argument, I would argue that our economy is net positive when it comes to what illegal aliens put in vs what they take out.
But there’s plenty of reasons to hate Sheriff Joe. Like the fact that he tortures inmates (often to death), many of whom haven’t even see a trial to establish guilt.