Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Mitch Townsend A paraphrase of Beowulf (starting around line 1383).
Beowulf said “We must mourn our friends later; they have died, but we have not yet avenged them. While we live, we win whatever victories we can; so now let us hunt the monster, whether its trail lead through the middle of the earth or the bottom of the sea.”
The monster is hiding, but heroes are hunting it.
LGF is having way too much fun finding crazies in Barack Obama’s blog community. It looks like it was inspired by Daily Kos’s community of like-minded progressives, where everyone gets his own little sublease to part of the real estate. The problem is that Obama’s campaign has attracted all kinds of crazies. The people running and moderating the little bloglets are way out of their depth; they don’t catch some of the real poisonous things until Charles or one of his lizard minions finds it and publicizes it. Shortly after, the offending blog is removed and the archives are deleted.
Maybe it’s unfair to judge a candidate by his supporters. If it were just one or two, I might go along with that. In this case, though, there is a whole ward of drooling loonies who think Obama is their kind of guy, and Obama’s campaign furnishes them with a soapbox and a microphone.
Before this is through, nearly everyone on the planet will have expressed an opinion on the sub-prime mortgage crisis. It’s a little late, but I thought I should get mine in. Here are some points about the issue that I don’t think have been given much discussion.
Mortgage-backed derivatives are not new. Some 20 years ago, FNMA introduced the REMIC (Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit). These were pools of mortgages that were split into various tranches or classes of maturity and quality, which were then sold separately, similar to the way today’s collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) are sold.
There were some important differences between this first generation and its descendants. I would like to point out some of the differences, since they may highlight the reasons behind the collapse.
