Am I Having a Saturday Morning Stupid Moment?

We typically get only 1-3% ratios, unless we make the resistors very wide, and area consumptive.

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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 I love to cook with wine     Sometimes I even put it in the food

Lets the air (smoke?) out of a lot of pipe dreams as well.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
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I didn't mean all of them, just the majority ;-)

Else we would not be in this perpetual budget mess and ever-present screaming for tax increases in California.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Those are all open systems, while conservation of energy applies to closed systems only. Also, the analogy between money and energy is just that -- an anology -- and thus it may or may not be appropriate to apply the laws governing one to the other.

This is not to say that the examples above don't think that they can ignore the basic laws of economics, which *do* apply...

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Guy Macon

It's closed systems. You can only spend as much as there is tax revenue. Yet that gets ignored time and again. In the mortgage industry you can only dole out what the underlying real estate values are. As we all know the bankers screwed that up as well. Big time. Then they started leveraging the leverage that was already leveraged, as an editor in Flying Magazine put it. We all know what that resulted in.

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Regards, Joerg

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You mentioned hedge fund managers. In what way is a hedge fund manager a closed system with no inputs or outputs, as opposed to an open system with inputs and outputs in the stock market?

True, but that does not make it a closed system. Trivial example: The government spends some of your tax money on building a wall in a national park. You lose money, the park gains a wall. Maybe they are even equally valuable. Then the government spends some of your tax money on digging a big hole in the ground and some more of your tax money filling it in. Are you still out the money? Yes. Was something of value like a wall created? No. So wealth was lost. Now try losing energy in a closed physical system. It's not possible.

So if I take out a mortgage and buy a swamp, drain it, put in a roads and some utilities, and build some houses on it, the real estate value is conserved and thus does not change? And if you burn down that houses and dump a bunch of toxic waste there the value of that real estate still remains unchaanged?

Yes, I fully agree that there are parts of the examples you cited where someone tried to convince others he was making something from nothing, and that something analogous to conservation of energy tells us that this was not possible. You don't need to keep giving more examples of that. I will agree with every one. To prove a closed system, you need to establish that *every* financial transaction is like that. I just gave you some that are not.

This is basic economics that goes back to _The Wealth of Nations_ by Adam Smith (published in 1776.)

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Guy Macon

The real cause was (as usual) too much government. A decade or so ago, somebody decided that affirmative action should apply to housing, i.e., the government punished banks that didn't meet their quota of minority mortgageholders. And, of course, to make that pill easier to swallow for the bankers, the politicos said, "Oh, don't worry - if it tanks, we'll take care of you."

Which, of course, as was inevitable, led to what we see today.

And people continue to refuse to clue up.

One of the most basic signs of insanity is doing the same stuff and expecting different results.

Sigh.

Thanks, Rich

This is just a bullshit right-wing talking point.

The prohibition on "red-lining" specific (mostly minority) districts dates back to the Carter administration, which is a bit more than a decade ago (but that makes it obvious that it isn't what caused this situation, hence the need for distortion).

The current situation arose from a combination of:

1. An extended period of low interest rates on secure investments (e.g. federal bonds), tempting the lenders towards "not quite as secure" investments with significantly better returns.

1. Insufficient regulation (i.e. not enough government, rather than too much), of emerging financial instruments, primarily credit default swaps (CDS).

The combination of the two resulted in vast amounts of capital being lent against assets which were grossly overvalued, and which left insurers grossly overcommitted (i.e. they underestimated the proportion of the insured risk which would end up having to be payed out).

The sub-prime portion of the market was just the last straw, as the CDS industry had perfected its scam to the point that they could take the worst loans imaginable and still get a AAA credit rating for them. This wasn't a case of the government *making* them lend money, but simply letting them.

And by "government", we're talking about the Bush Jr administration. The "toxic" loans which ultimately caused the scam to fail are mainly from the last few of years, when the CDS market got to the point that the lenders would give mortgages to absolutely anyone ("NINA" loans: No Income, No Assets).

Regardless of where you want to place the blame, I don't see how it relates to the "government forced banks to lend money to minorities" claim.

Well, since that seems to be the tenor of the day, I guess we're going to find out the hard way that addiction to regulation isn't the answer, just like the Soviet Union did.

Thanks, Rich

Hope This Helps! Rich

Not really, just links to a bunch of wingers spewing the same talking point.

But money is not conserved. The US Treasury just printed about a trillion more, because they felt like it.

John

And the Fed has become a customer for it ($300bn for starters), which strikes me as being an exceptionally disturbing development.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

Oh, the US (and likely world) economy is being trashed by amateur idiots, not even professional idiots. We've entered the age of Terabuck Teleprompter Economics.

Buy real estate. Your money's no good here, pardner.

John

Only problem is, then you become a landlord. With all the headaches that entails such as tenants becoming rogue, not paying, trashing the place, and so on. If you hire a property management company the financials might not look so good anymore.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Yeah, but perhaps less risky than stocks these days?

A pal of mine just bought a rental property and rented instantly to welfare-types. Their government rent subsidy check pays him

1.5x his monthly note on the place, plus the occupant has to pay a pittance too.

I wondered why rents were so high in a low-price area, then realized this was why--the government sets the minimum price with their sudsidies, and they're very generous!

Cheers, James Arthur

Well, it _was_ Saturday. ;-)

Cheers! Rich