The Banks Strike Back | Hacker News Reader

The Banks Strike Back

banksimple.net

43 pointsstilist22 comments

Same story: The government and the banks work together to make feel-good legislation that allows the status quo to continue on. Private groups like BankSimple and Move Your Money are the quickest route to meaningful financial reforms. We can see that we live in a very corporatist state that isn't going to fix itself soon.

http://moveyourmoney.info/

This is a bill out of congress, it's not "the government", it's 535 congressmen, with assorted aides and lobbyists.

Right or wrong, the Republicans decided they were going to vote en masse against anything the democrats want to do regarding.. anything. This means that the democrats need to get 100% of the votes from within their caucus and allows a couple corrupt senators to ruin the whole process.

If we had 100 senators trying to solve problems, we'd be able to get 60 reasonable people to agree on something. When you start with 60 and need every last one, you're gonna have some stinker clauses in there.

You're talking about a technicality. Yes, it's not in the executive branch for sure - it's just through the initial part of the legislature. However, if you think both sides (R's & D's) haven't been extremely influenced you're living in a partisan fantasy.

Democrats love to talk populism while taking contributions from big everything (biz, banks, unions, special interests, etc). The Republicans do the same shit - they just talk populism seasoned with pro-business themes.

No, I'm talking about a clear-cut fact.

All the standard-issue corruption aside, the current Republican party has made it their official policy to gum up congress completely, hoping that come election-time, they can point to a lack of progress and regain control of the House. It's clear as day. It might even be a good move, from a game theory perspective. Not so much from a "honor the oath you swore when you took office" perspective.

Sadly, it's the same people whining about the bank bailout who can't see why voting with their savings and loan dollars will do the most good. Sadly, most people are all talk.

I down voted you because most people simply don't understand what's going on behind the scene. When you don't have knowledge to make a decision you cannot be expected to make the right decision.

Try explaining the gory details fiscal derivatives and risk to majority of the population and how the banking system collapse to majority of the population. Like me almost none of them will get it. You need a conceptual foundation to understand the black magic going on over here and most people simply don't have it.

This is one of the reasons why people don't vote with their dollars as they are expected to. Moreover, human emotions are overpowering. Give someone the bait of 15X returns in 1/15th of the time with a small paragraph of risk added to the red herring prospectus and watch them jump out of their seats.

"You need a conceptual foundation to understand the black magic going on over here and most people simply don't have it."

The people executing the trades don't understand them, either.

Or some know perfectly well what is going on and don't care because of the potential for short term gains.

Chromium has a red jollyroger for the certificate warning for www.banksimple.net, but firefox doesn't indicate an issue with the cert. Examining the cert's fields, I'm not sure what is causing Chromium to indicate it like that, especially since it says the certificate is verified/valid.

It is because it is the first time you have visited the site, you can click the crossbones to see what the warnings are, not exactly user friendly though.

That actually makes sense... now to find out what makes it think it's after my first visit. A non-crashing browser means I leave it running for days at a time.

>> Connection Partially Encrypted.

>> Parts of the page you are viewing were not encrypted before being transmitted over the Internet.

I won't trust a bank with this error.

It's their blog page, not their money transfer page.

I agree, but sense of security is also important.

I also wrote a post on the impact of regulation on banking wages in my personal blog. http://bit.ly/8Zfh6h

The bill is regulation theater. Two key points from the article:

   Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are completely ignored. 
   Still tax-payer owned and funded, they continue to be 
   huge time-bombs on the government’s balance-sheet.

   The bill does nothing to make banks hold more capital.

> The bill does nothing to make banks hold more capital.

The bill also says that certain banks will be bailed out. As a result, they will have lower cost of borrowing.

Govt guarantees for financial institutions - what could possibly go wrong.... (And, no, the guarantees are not for depositors.)

I couldn't even read that article because of the multiple font sizes and line spacing issues. (I'm on iOS4, Mobile Safari)

Aren't those are headings and block quotes? I didn't check, but the line spacing looks the same throughout of the body of the actual post.

What exactly is the "shadow banking industry" that the article mentions?

http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/27/news/newsmakers/gross_bankin...

    My Pimco colleague Paul McCulley has labeled it the 
    "shadow banking system" because it has lain hidden for 
    years, untouched by regulation, yet free to magically and 
    mystically create and then package subprime loans into a 
    host of three-letter conduits that only Wall Street 
    wizards could explain.

The "shadow banking industry" essentially consists of the commercial paper, repo, and other over the counter markets where bonds are traded on a short term basis. Essentially, banks and corporations that have 10s or 100s of millions of dollars lend it to each other, using bonds as "collateral" (protection against default). This market is now bigger than the regular banking industry, and there is evidence that the demand for investment-grade bonds to use as collateral was a contributor to the growth of the securitization industry and the sub-prime bubble.

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