Planet Money

"Bailing out banks, one toxic asset at a time"

This article is about two men named Albert and Raj that go through towns, or villages, and buy houses that are in foreclosure or "underwater." houses that are "underwater" mean that the house is worth less than the mortgage for the house. The article also talks about how this process works. It works like this:

1. Banks give out mortgages to people who have stopped paying.

2. Then to get rid of the mortgages that the people don't pay they sell them for discounts to large investment funds like Hedge Funds. Banks sell mortgages thousands at a time to investment funds.

3. Most of the mortgages investment funds don't like to keep so they make the price higher than what they bought them for and sell them to people like Albert and Raj.

some information:
1. Hedge Funds can buy mortgages for $.30 of a dollar so if the bank sold it for $100,000 they get it for $30,000. Then sell them again for about $.40 on a dollar.

2. People like Albert and Raj won't even know if there is someone living in the house or not before they buy their mortgages. They just care about whether the home is in foreclosure, how high the interest rate is on the home, the value of the home, what the neighborhood is like (even though they have no intentions on living there), and if the home has a for sale sign by the driveway or on the front lawn.

Is this evil?
This article connects to what I know about the Great Depression because during the early state of the Great Depression it was the stocks that had dropped and people lost a lot of money. In the Article that I have read I had an understanding that if I wanted relate it to the Great Depression by replacing the stock market with mortgage investments and that when the stock market was rising in sales, before the Great Depression, it would be considered as right now in our country where people are buying mortgages of houses that are going into foreclosure and making money. Today in our country this business of buying mortgages of houses going into foreclosure hasn't hit a depression because of all the thousands of houses going into foreclosure but I would definitely say that the people that live in the houses going into foreclosure are going through a Great Depression.






Bailing out Banks

Jimmy Carter speech..

His body language in the speech wasn't that bad.. the thing that i noticed that he kept looking down at his little note card things that he had written, also he seemed really tense in the speech, like he was nervous or not prepared..



the problem in America is the lack of confidence.
personally i think that this is still a problem in the US today. we have a lack of confidence today economy, the safeness of the country, and terrorism.



To sum up what carter is saying in this section is that people don't value or strongly respect what they use to for example people use to respect the schools, church's and the government... now he's saying that a persons is not defined by what one does, it by what a person owns, that's saying that a person is valued by the assets that person owns.
today i still think that this has the same effect, as it did back then.. in high school it feels like today that we all have to have the abercrombie and fitch, and hollister, and the top brands to even fit in, and for another example we look at a person and they have a nice car we instantly think that there rich.... and sometimes thats not the case..

Nixon...

 Nixon's Domestic Policies

 

What were Nixon's Domestic policies?

Nixon refused to fallow the Eisenhower pattern of consolidating democratic programs and attempting to run the more efficiently.

 

To Nixon race was the most important domestic issue. The department of Health, Education, and welfare stalled on implementing desegregation of the southern school districts until prodded by federal court orders. With Nixon setting the tone by declaring that legal segregation was inadmissible; almost all of the all-black southern schools were merged into unitary school districts by 1970.

 

Nixon's proposed amendments to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, up for renewal in 1970, were tilted toward the South. The president proposed that its provisions be extended to all states so as not to "discriminate" against one region and that voting-rights lawsuits be tried first in state courts, a change that would have diminished the prospects of effective enforcement of the law.

 

 

The Nixon administration had its own proposals to fight poverty. It rejected two approaches that were being considered at the end of the Johnson administration—nationalizing the existing welfare program or instituting a guaranteed minimum income through a negative income tax—and instead proposed a program of family allowances developed by the Urban Affairs Council under the direction of Daniel Moynihan. The program was eventually defeated in the Senate in 1970 by an unlikely coalition of conservatives and liberals.

 

Nixon's domestic record was neither liberal nor conservative, but politically pragmatic. His civil rights policies; judicial appointments; and unsuccessful attempts to appoint southerners to the Supreme Court all represented political payoffs to the South. Nominees Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell were blocked by a coalition of legislators sensitive to charges by civil rights organizations that these men, while on the federal bench, had either demonstrated opposition to Supreme Court case law protecting the rights of blacks or demonstrated incompetence in applying the law.

 

The 70's response.

The Brady Bunch.




In this clip of the Brady Bunch, Martha and her 2 sisters were reading the dear libby column, she goes to read the next article and she just stops reading it, her sisters are like keep reading... but what the column was about person who got divorced and has three new kids, he/she wants to know if she should pretend to "love" the kids until they destroy their marriage or what. that itself, tells the martha thinks that this article has to do with there family.. but there just not sure which parent wrote this... In the 70's you start to see more and more women's rights, if women can get jobs and still support their families and they didn't like their marriage then they were more than likely going to get out, where as in the 50's women really didn't have a choice becauese they didn't have a very good education...

Book Portfolio Q2..

What work is..
Kacey McNally!

"You've never done something so simple, so obvious, not because your too young or dumb, not because your jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, No, just because you don't know what work is"... this touching quote is from the a poem out of an award winning poetry book called what work is, written by Philip Levine.

What is the definition of "Work"? the definition back then is a lot different then it is know a days. back then the work was more dangerous and harder. Philip Levine takes us back to when it was the worst. When the men had to work breathing in toxins that were bad to be breathing. the men were also developing illnesses and they we not able to support their families. Here today it is still hard to support our families, but it is also hard to find a job. Philip also takes us back to some of the jobs that he had when he was young. For example, the he worked in the soap factory, he had to take shaved pieces of soap and bring them to where they would be made into bars of soap.

Why was the work so hard?? what i get out of this book, is why the work is so difficult is because of the conditions, and the air that is floating around the building. Today, when people work around hazardous chemicals they are covered in a suit that protects them, but back then they weren't, they would be wearing what they came into work in. so pretty much the bosses just didn't care.

How you grow up is how your life's going to turn out... throughout the book he reveals different things about his life as simple as what a train is called, to when him and his friends got drunk off "Gin", from that to where he grew up & where the coldest he's been; but all this information may seem pointless but really it all leads up to why he's writing this book. the lesson is how you experience things is the way your going to be your future.

Me as a person, i have kinda worked before, doing hay out in the fields and working on equipment. so i have some experience of what is going to be like when i get a real job in the future. But Levine makes so many good point in the book about how it was back then and me knowing how its like now a days it was changes so much. as a person im so glad that i am going to be working now a days then compared to back then... my dad tells me all the time i'd never be able to live back then when things were difficult...

What's Next...?

The Space Race

The Space race, we engaged in it because of the rivalry between the united states and the Soviet union during the Cold war. i Also think that we did it because whatever they do we think we can do it better... and about was it a good idea or did we waste recourses... i think that we wasted resources i mean whats the big deal of having the first person on the moon, all we did was mark it with the USA flag. who's gonna see it?.. mhmm no one unless you we take 10 or so years and go up there...
well i think that the united states should focus more on whats going on in our country, more then whats going one everywhere else in the world...we try to be friends with all the other countries, and i think all it's doing is not getting us anywhere... its like gossip we have to know whats going on everywhere else and we don't worry what could happen here for being so noisy. i just think that we have other more important problems to deal with then whats going on in oher countries... [ie] education, health care, the economy!!

L.B.J response

The food Stamp act 1964

The Food stamp program is a federal assistance program that provides food to low to no income people that live in the united states. Benefits are distributed by the individual states, but the program is administered through the U.S Department of Agriculture. To use the benefits you now have a card that has the amount of benefits on it. For most of the history of the program people actually had used paper denominational stamps/coupons worth $1, $5 and $10. these stamps could have been used on anything no matter the value of the product. But in the 1990's the stamps got old, and they got revamped to the specialized debit card system known as Electronic benefit transfer (EBT). As of October 2008 the Food Stamp Program was renamed to the supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The number of Americans receiving food stamps 31.5 million in September 2008. The average of recipients benefits $100 a month per family member.

The Food Stamp Program, I personally think it was a good legislation because it gave a chance for the people that barley could get by a chance to get the food and things that they need to stay healthy. But i think people today just use it to bum off the state. because if you have don't have a job, therefore you have no income so you have no why to get the food that you need... the people that do this are the lazy ones that just don't want to go out and get a job...