18
votes
What's something that now looks very different to you in hindsight?
It can be something personal to your life, or something public/newsworthy.
Your change on it can be anything -- from negative to positive or vice versa, or simply a different perspective or understanding.
Tell us what it was, what changed, and, if possible, why you think that change came about.
Broadly, the slippery slope of political extremism and my own desire to stick my head in the sand.
Watching the politics of the last 20 years evolve across my adult life, It's become pretty clear from the evolving views of family members, peers and movements that stubbornness leads to isolation, aversion to intolerance and a downswing in the economy to panic and blame.
The hindsight here is that the 'good times' are fleeting, and that innoculating yourself from it is a never ending slugfest between seeing the world honestly and retreating to nostalgia echo chambers.
As an elder millennial, spending my formative years in the good times gives me false hope that this collective despair moment we're in is nothing but a fever dream. When I hit the town, mine is visibly the last generation with enough disposal money to spend on luxuries like cocktails and dinner out. We're still pretending it's 2010 whereas younger generations are working multiple jobs while living at home.
I try to convince myself that it'll all be over in November, but, as Tom Hanks says in Cloud Atlas "That's not the True True".
It's dismal shit.
... Now excuse me while I buy another retro handheld.
2008 happened and no one went to prison.
Like people were saying that at the time, but man it has been wild seeing the result of that play out in the global economy. These corporations are untouchable and all they have to do is amplify peoples political complaints to keep us distracted and we fall for it every time.
The thing is, for people to go to prison, you actually need them to do something illegal. Investing poorly is not illegal. Miscalculating risk of financial instruments isn't illegal. Misleading customers is illegal, but only if there is ill intent (that is, you know that something is wrong and purposefully withheld the truth, as opposed to simply being fooled yourself), which is incredibly difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
I mean, definitely not. Many investment banks went bankrupt. The ones that survived took a long time to recover to where they were before. The impact on the industry of investment banking was catastrophic.
The impact on mortgages was similarly severe. You know how people complain all the time now that they can't get approved for a mortgage? Yeah. From 2008.
The bailouts weren't free money. They were almost exclusively either two things:
Loans, with interest, that had to paid back
Buying of assets for pennies on the dollar.
The federal government actually made money from the bailouts, as a result. It cost the public negative money.
I'm less mad about the lack of a more aggressive pursuit of those who purposely miscalculated the risk of financial instruments in order to sell them to unknowing customers for profit and more mad about that somehow the only way forward was for us to create a situation in which the already rich (private equity) take 100% advantage of the situation and make massive profit while all of the folks who lost everything (those about to retire, those just entering the workforce) will never get what they lost back and that financial ruin is already being felt in the next generation after them.
What does private equity have to do with anything? They were the least exposed to the 2008 shenanigans to begin with. I suppose in a way they benefited by not being destroyed in the same way, but that’s just… smart risk management by their part?
They benefited by taking advantage of the companies going bankrupt, they'd buy them up using government loans, use that capital to feed themselves and to this day they continue to gobble up companies.
I get that the government was trying to help, but what they ended up doing was allowing taxpayer dollars to be used as company collateral for companies who would buy up entire organizations and lay off the whole workforce anyway.
What they should have done was put that money directly into people's retirement accounts. What they should have done was pay off people's student loans. Then, maybe, I can see how giving money to corps and boosting the economy in that way made sense.
None of the loans went to private equity, it was mainly used to bailout major publicly held investment banks.
Private equity did expand in the years proceeding, but that had nothing to do with federal tax money. It was simply because private equity did not have the same level of exposure as public investment companies into MBS and CDS, so they were relatively unscathed.
That doesn't really help. The issue wasn't a general demand shrinkage like in a normal recession, the acute issue was that banks, believe it or not, are an important part of the economic infrastructure of the nation, and if a significant portion of them went under it would have far more impact than just the dollar amount.
It's if someone had destroyed all the highways in the US vs random parts of the US. Even if it had the same nominal dollar value, roads have value far exceeding the nominal value of their construction.
We'll never know if it would have helped, because they didn't even try. In 2009 all us kids couldn't find part time jobs because everyone's 70 year old grampa was working the Taco Bell drive thru instead of retiring, if the government could have helped them retire, who knows how it would have been?
Obama passed this massive stimulus and it just barely helped the most at risk people, and let the entire middle class slide down into poverty, because that's what the US social system does, waits until you've got nothing of value and THEN keeps you alive, just barely.
There's always tradeoffs. The bailouts were a very targeted package. And in that respect, they worked fantastically. Like I said, the bailouts didn't even cost money, it cost negative money.
It's true that the government didn't pass much fiscal stimulus, and there was a spike in unemployment, but the other side of that was that the post 2008 recovery had very low inflation.
On the other hand, after COVID, the government passed a LOT of fiscal stimulus. This meant that the so-called soft landing did occur, unemployment was steady after the initial "go home" spike, and there was never even an economic recession.
But high inflation doggedly follows the economy to this day. Which is better? High inflation with low unemployment, or low inflation with high unemployment?
Right now it sounds like a lot of people would rather the former. Sometimes the grass is always greener.
There's a lot of room between 'hand out stim checks to everyone' and 'more stimulus to folks who need it' lol
What we really coulda used was some kinda ongoing program, there was a point in like 2010 where they knew that unemployment had gone beyond how bad they thought it was going to be, and they did nothing about it.
Great conext. I'm not up on the fall out of the '08 crisis as my country had banking regulations that helped us weather the storm, but I'm curious: did those who tool the loans pay them back? Did the federal government come out on top?
My province has a similar issue in that companies charged with environmental reclamation went bankrupt and dissolved before they could manage their e ergy assets, and as a result, there is an overwhelming number of unmanaged oil wells whose dead proponents owed millions to local land owners.
Like 2008, there are ripple effects across the environment and the taxpayer is left holding the bag.
To the other user's point, it almost doesn't matter what the "justice served" or the government's balance ledger looks like years after the fact, the issue is that regulatory capture and poor enforcement led to the landscape changing for the worse for everyone.
Who could possibly be accountable for the failure of the government to regulate? Who would punish that? Nobody.
Yep. All the loans were paid back, with interest. The government absolute came out on top. Not only was every dollar of bailout recovered, but the government actually made an additional $109b in net profit.
They indeed held the bag... a bag with $109 billion in it! Now, compared to the annual US federal budget, $109b is a drop in the bucket, but -$109b is a pretty cheap price to pay for economic stability. It's approximately $109b cheaper than a McDouble, after all.
The government? 2008's financial crisis was a major reason that Obama won such a staggering landslide victory in the elections that year.
The fed government basically created a situation in which only they and large companies exist. Money goes back and forth between them, which helps bond and stock prices, and since the numbers look good everyone celebrates. The US government no longer works for the people, it works for the corporations. You could say this had been slowly happening since the constitution was written but 2008, in my opinion as someone who lived through it and was affected by it first hand, is that 2008 was the final nail in the coffin.
They've cut the average American citizen totally out of the economy. Americans largely don't own stock, a house, or really anything of value at all any more. The stock market looks amazing but people are struggling to eat. Entire generations of Americans won't ever retire, won't ever pay back their student loans, and now, won't ever have kids because they can't even afford to go on dates.
I was college age at the time, and everyone around me was saddled with massive student loan debt because our parents, on paper, made too much money for us to qualify for government grants. Even those who did qualify, the grants only cover tuition, not living expenses, and any housing even near a college campus was already insanely expensive in the early 20-teens. I personally did not go to college until I was 25 years old because at that age is when you no longer have to include your parents information on your student loan forms. I worked min wage jobs, lived in shitty apartments, and created no wealth for myself from 18-28 years old, an age where I should have been building wealth and starting a family.
When I finally graduated and could be hired at decent paying jobs, I had several bosses whom had been c-suite level before 2008 and were now middle managers, making half what they were before, with no retirement because the market crashed so hard it took like 20 years to break even.
I met people who bought starter homes in 2007 and couldn't sell until like, four years ago, so them and all they kids squeezed into this tiny 2 br that they can't sell cause the mortgage is more than the house is worth. They turned down jobs which would have required them to move, they stopped having kids even though they wanted more because there was just no space. I met even more people who were living in apartments at the time, had kids and so couldn't go to college at that point, and they'll be stuck renting for forever. They're permanently priced out of the housing market and the stock price doesn't care so the US government doesn't care.
ty for coming to my ted talk
The Ted talk of a generation.
Maybe not? I recently ran across a book (reviewed here) claiming based on IRS data that most of the wealthy are more in the multi-millionaire range (above $10 million) rather than billionaires, and they own businesses that aren't traditional corporations.
This is due to specific tax breaks for pass-through businesses that started in 1986.
From the book:
The other 50% of people are employed by 5% of businesses which are c corp and hide their profits from the fed
One person in the US was sent to prison. Kareem Serageldin. Because this idiot also fraudulently inflated the performance of his portfolio. Plain old wire fraud and book cooking. Hardly related if it wasn't for the fact he was cooking books for his mortgage bonds during the 2008 crisis.
The prices paid for the subprime lending scandals were financial rather than penal.
What always struck me as odd is how the regulatory bodies were never indicted. They were supposed to prevent the bonds and mortgages from turning into toxic sludge. And just never did.
Right like Im aware that 1000s of people were involved but they really did not try at all. The government takeover of freddie and fannie was just a drop in the water of an entire industry willing to turn any asset into sludge just to make a profit. An example should have been made of the whole lot.
Thinking I had found true love in high school.
It really was just two young people that worked pretty well together when we saw each other every day at school, but the relationship definitely wasn't going to work out in the long term. There were cracks and red flags in the relationship that I wanted to ignore because I thought I had the one. My ex was right in wanting to break up when I went off to college, but I was too stubborn and sure that we were meant to be and that doing a distance relationship for a year before she came to the same school would work out.
I was bitter about us finally breaking up for a while, spiraled and made some stupid decisions, but looking back on the relationship with hindsight it was a good experience that taught me a lot of lessons. Some of those lessons were very painful but valuable nonetheless. Hopefully she ended up happy wherever she is now, but I don't think I'll ever take the effort to find out where she ended up.
Being a Dad.
Before I became one I was adamant that I'd be better than my Dad was. Now that I am a Dad and my kids are getting bigger, I can see some of the areas where he tried his best and appreciate things he did more. Having that appreciation will never repair our relationship, but in light of my own experiences I try to have more compassion for him and have made the effort to talk to him a bit more. It won't be a change to anything other than low contact, and he'll never have an active part in my kids lives, but I've tried to at least engage with him in areas that we have common ground on.
Malcolm in the Middle.
When I was a kid, I thought the mom was very annoying, always mad at the kids for everything, now from the perspective of an adult I realized that she's the most loving mother possible, her anger was completely justified and it's a miracle she didn't want to murder them.