Obama has done nothing but spout the same rhetoric that every president does. Bush spoke about bringing peace to the world too, he didnt get a prize, and what makes them any different?
what makes bush any different from Obama?
Sure Obama has a great smile, and he speaks so well. He's a politician, thats his real job, smile and say everything is alright.

I suppose it's because he does it so well?

A little off-topic, but there's a Nobel Prize for many fields, am I wrong?

Yes, this was specifically the Nobel Peace Prize (there is only one Nobel "Peace" Prize).

"he's doing his best to protect US citizens from themselves"

I can barely stand to read the stuff you write giapeep. Unfortunately, in this case I think you may have hit the nail on the head. That's exactly what Obama thinks his role is. And that is the worst possible thing he could think...

And I have to admit I'm with Cent...go play some diplomacy or go away...

"really ghostmaker? you think regulation under a REPUBLICAN president caused this recession. Prove it. This should give me a chuckle or two"

I do.

Firstly, this was not a republican president in the normal sense. Bush cannot be described as anti-regulation. He introduced the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which increased regulation; even with scandals such as Enron, this represents a deviation from the normal path of Republican thinking, and also penalises those who do business legitimately. He also pushed for new regulation for Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/business/new-agency-proposed-to-oversee-freddie-mac-and-fannie-mae.html

Bush was not, therefore, your standard Republican- coming after 8 years of Democrat rule, you'd have thought he'd have had rather larger bonfire, wouldn't you. We have, and had, a mix of free markets and regulation. That is undeniable, regardless of the colour worn by the president, and it is vital to ask which part failed.

There are a few aspects of regulatory error that caused everything to be built so high and then fall like a stack of cards:

Firstly, the setting of interest rates is balmy. In communist Russia, the price of bread was set by a group of men sitting around the table. They invariably got it wrong. Normally too low, resulting in shortages, but sometimes too high, causing surpluses to be made. Bread is much simpler than interest rates, so we shouldn't be surprised that they get it wrong.

In 2003 the Fed lowered interest rates to 1%, with inflation at 3 or 4%. In other words, the real interest rate is negative, you are paid to borrow money *even if you don't actually make a profit on the investments you make with it*.

This means that everyone borrows money, often buying homes. This tendency is amplified by the housing policy in the United States. Every President, Republican or Democrat, since FDR has wanted to increase home ownership. Mortgages have been subsidised; banks have been encouraged to lend money to people who clearly couldn't afford it just for political favours. Bush was successful in increasing home ownership from 65% to 70% in the US.

An ever increasing demand for homes results in an ever increasing price. It was so persistent, since through any downturn the governments and central banks pumped money into the economies, that people thought that houses were a sure fire investment. They believed that you could never make a loss on them, and therefore you could never make a loss on a mortgage.

The logic banks then made was sound- houses are guaranteed profit, so there is very little risk, so lets leverage as much as possible to maximise gain. This would have been okay if it wasn't based on a faulty premise. Houses were only guaranteed profit for as long as the interest rate kept on dropping and staying well below inflation, and that was unsustainable because low interest rates cause inflation, which would eventually lead to disaster.

I'll pause briefly in the general narrative to strengthen the point. Things weren't that simple. If the above description was the whole case, only banks lending to American home owners would be in real trouble. The difficulty is that the regulatory restrictions on leverage meant that people tied webs around themselves so that they could take more risk. The logic above, which anyone would come to unless they were avid fans of Austrian economics (and the years of uninterrupted growth made Austrian economics look at a glance to be dead wrong- this monetary policy appeared to work), meant that 'risk' didn't appear to anyone to be risky.

The addition system used to calculate how much capital the bank actually had was like this, under the recourse rule (more regulation): an AA- or AAA-rated asset-backed security had a 20% risk rate, cash had a 0% risk and a personal mortgage had a 50% risk rate.

In a free market, there isn't much reason for buying the AA or AAA mortgage backed bonds. If you are looking for safety, go for the governments' bonds etc. but if you want yield, go for the mortgages and cut out the middle man. But nobody wants to actually have mortgages, because the counting system means that you can't have as many of them. Far better to get mortgages, sell them to somebody else, and then buy different mortgages as an AA or AAA package. Then your own assets count as 20% risk, not 50%, and you can do more business.

So we see that regulation has both (a) directly encouraged reckless personal borrowing, which has (b) encouraged come-what-may investment in houses and mortgages (which are secured by the house, the price of which is rising) and (c) created a very tight web of interactions by making that the way to get maximum leverage.

Then, from about 2005 to 2006, interest rates were increased by the Fed from 1% to 5.25% in what I think is the quickest rise in interest rates in US history. Suddenly the following happens:

People who had flexible rate mortgages can't pay them.
Banks start making losses on people who have fixed rate mortgages.
People stop buying houses.

Therefore, house prices go down, meaning that banks repossessing homes from those entering bankruptcy still don't recoup their losses. Banks are now loosing money on all the mortgages that they were led to believe were safe by the way regulation was set up and the effects of the way it was set up. Many to all banks have these mortgages, but nobody knows how many or whether they come from institutions that are unsafe or not because of the web that had been created by the pass the parcel game that had resulted from the twin factors of believing you couldn't make a loss on a mortgage and the way that regulation encouraged it as a way of increasing the leverage you could have. This lack of knowledge about which banks actually had a problem meant that investors assumed that all banks had a problem and the plug was pulled, people went on the defensive as bank shares proceeded to plummet, reducing spending and loosing confidence. Banks realising how much risk they had stopped lending more money, so credit froze and so did business. Consumption had fallen, the means of production, credit, had dried up, and a recession resulted.

It is easy to blame greedy bankers, because we don't intuitively understand that the lending of money is the fuel, not the load in the motor of our economy. It is easy to point to the fact that there was a big financial industry making loads of money which collapsed, and say that it was their fault, but that doesn't answer the question: Why was things so obviously *not beneficial to anyone* as people buying houses they couldn't afford, investing in projects that were in real terms breaking even or loosing to inflation, lending money to the people who were doing these things, why was that profitable in a free market? There was no reason why they would be in a free market, it was because there was regulation, because the market was not free, that a game was made in which they were profitable.

The fact is ultimately this: regulation changes the rules of the economic game (which I must emphasise isn't zero-sum, but that's another misconception), and nobody can predict what effect that has on the game. We introduce many rule changes at once to a massive playing board, with no idea how everything will interact. It is like playing chess on a single, enormous board with nearly 7 billion players, each with several sets of chessmen , and then restricting the number of moves people can make, with the specific aim to increase the number of pawn promotions happening. The fact is, nobody can hope to predict what is going to happen, let alone control the outcome by setting the rules, so lets go with the principle of free trade- so the vast majority of the time everyone in a trade benefits, as being the guarantor that most of the time when a house is built, or a jumper knitted or a loan lent, it is not stacking up a pile of cards that will fall down, bringing our world with them.

Let's put our faith in the fact that most people are responsible most of the time, so will not default on payments, will not fail to deliver a product, as the basis of our economy; and let's not put our faith in groups of suit-wearing men around tables to make universal decisions as to how to improve the rules, because when they inevitably get it wrong, everyone, not just the few who are irresponsible, suffers greatly as we have seen.

That was too long for me to want to proof read it. Sorry.

TGM, that's a good analysis. I just want to add a couple points; I'll try to keep it short. (^_^)

>you are paid to borrow money

Of course, this ‘you’ isn't you or me; only the big banks get to borrow from the Fed at the Prime Rate. But the lower the rates that they get to borrow, the lower the rates that they'll offer to us, and the more that they'll try to tempt us to borrow.

As you point out, the start of all of this is the Fed, which tries to manage the price of borrowing money like the Soviet comissars tried to manage the price of bread (although not in quite as heavy-handed a way). When people talk about ‘regulation’, they usually don't even think about this, but in a way it's a much bigger government involvment. I expect that we could probably handle the regulation (not that that makes it good) if the Fed wasn't running things at the beginning. But nobody wants to reform the Fed, except to give it even more control.

(Actually, lots of people want to reform or even do away with the Fed, from Ron Paul to Ralph Nader. But they're all crazy fringe nuts, don't you know!)

Another point that you didn't mention: Since the government bailed out the big banks with failed investments, they have even more incentive to do stupid things next time. After all, if they have to do is get big enough before the crash that they're ‘too big to [be allowed to] fail’.

"Of course, this ‘you’ isn't you or me; only the big banks get to borrow from the Fed at the Prime Rate. But the lower the rates that they get to borrow, the lower the rates that they'll offer to us, and the more that they'll try to tempt us to borrow."

True, but that doesn't alter the argument.

"But nobody wants to reform the Fed, except to give it even more control."

I do (you might have guessed that one). In fact, I would rather central banks didn't exist at all.

"Another point that you didn't mention: Since the government bailed out the big banks with failed investments, they have even more incentive to do stupid things next time. After all, if they have to do is get big enough before the crash that they're ‘too big to [be allowed to] fail’."

Very true. We could go into the analysis of why the bail-outs were bad as well, but I'd rather not. Frankly the fact that the UK national debt is, including all the stuff off balance sheets that I'm aware of, £32k per person is too depressing. Servicing the interest on that will cost us annually about as much as the NHS. Of course, I see one obvious way to pay off the interest....

Canada's charter banking system, which is national, saved our butts in the last year. It is the most efficient and safest world wide. Centralized type of system do work, with guarantees to their customers.

@ TGM

>True, but that doesn't alter the argument.

Please don't think that I was trying to argue against you! Just to add to what you said. (And in this case, maybe to head off people who might argue that they don't actually get to borrow at real negative rates.)

>I would rather central banks didn't exist at all.

I agree with you there too!

>the UK national debt

I forgot that you're from the UK. (You wrote about the U.S., but this thread started with the U.S., so I shouldn't have assumed.) Anything different or the same there? (I don't know much about UK politics; probably more than most in the U.S. do, but that's not saying much!)

"Please don't think that I was trying to argue against you! Just to add to what you said. (And in this case, maybe to head off people who might argue that they don't actually get to borrow at real negative rates.)"

I know, that was a pre-emptive strike.:)

"I forgot that you're from the UK. (You wrote about the U.S., but this thread started with the U.S., so I shouldn't have assumed.) Anything different or the same there? (I don't know much about UK politics; probably more than most in the U.S. do, but that's not saying much!)"

We're worse off than you. Our debt per capita in pounds is about the same as your debt per capita in dollars.

I'll tell you the most incredible thing about the UK bailouts- the Prime Minister announced them, and implemented them without so much as summoning parliament. He gave the taxpayer liabilities which could themselves be hitting £2 trillion, or 100% GDP, and I thought the civil wars in our country were fought to establish that only the commons could commit to raises in taxation through legal means.

My figure above for debt is actually now I look more closely probably underestimated by a good 25%. Its virtually impossible to get the statistics because of the way our government hides its debt.

Even with all that hiding, we run the highest budget deficit in the OECD, and have on-the-balance sheet national debt of 61%*, as compared to 61.4% for Hungary, who have already called in the IMF:

http://www.adamsmith.org/images/stories/public%20spending%201.jpg
http://www.adamsmith.org/images/stories/public%20spending%202.jpg
http://www.adamsmith.org/images/stories/public%20spending%203.jpg

*That excludes PFIs, which are approximately 50% of GDP, and a large proportion of the bailout costs, which probably come to another 50-100%

So, looking at the stats again, we have about $3.4 trillion to $4.26 trillion in debt, or £2.15 trillion to £2.6 trillion.

To put it another way, if you created 20 stacks of pound coins, each stretching to the moon, you still wouldn't have enough to pay off the UK National debt.

I hate Labour so much.

This "is a classic case of an aspirational award" as the Committee's rationale is "an acknowledgement that those efforts have yet to yield results", adding:

Consider the long list of actions that Obama has promised: closing the facility at Guantanamo Bay within a year; achieving Middle East peace; ending the war in Iraq and defeating al Qaeda in Afghanistan; halting Iran's possible drive to a nuclear weapon; convincing North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.

Many of these have proven to be very difficult challenges. Obama appears likely to miss the deadline to close Guantanamo. The Middle East peace push is nearly off the rails, with Obama shifting course last month after failing to convince Israel to agree to even a temporary settlement freeze. The North Korea talks have been moribund.

Obama has on his desk a proposal to boost the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by 40,000 or more, a decision that could extend the fighting there for many years.

"Barack Obama's campaign may have changed the tone in international diplomacy, and that might have been a good thing," Campaign for Liberty President John Tate said. "However, his actions fail to match his campaign rhetoric. He is ramping up in Afghanistan, expanding the war into Pakistan and his administration is making plans to bomb Iran. At the same time, he has failed to make major troop withdrawals in Iraq, or anywhere else in the world."

The Obama Administration says there is "no option" on the table to end the violent occupation of Afghanistan and no intention of any near-end to the occupation of Iraq with 124,000 U.S. troops there now and the plan to have 50,000 occupying the country after the so-called 'withdrawal' process is 'achieved' in August 2010.

Liaqat Baluch, a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a conservative religious party, said: "It's a joke. How embarrassing for those who awarded it to him because he's done nothing for peace. What change has he brought in Iraq, the Middle East or Afghanistan?" (Reuters)

In the two wars Mr. Obama has been leading in 2009, 886 civilians were killed in Afghanistan from February to July [.pdf] and 2,629 in Iraq from February to August, Brian Doherty posted at the Reason blog. (h/t: Angela Keaton)

"The Nobel prize for peace? Obama should have won the 'Nobel Prize for escalating violence and killing civilians'," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters--posing as Mr. Pot to the kettle president.

"Obama hasn’t even had time to slaughter that many people," Campaign for Liberty editor-in-chief Anthony Gregory posted at The LRC Blog, with tongue-in-cheek. "He has only killed thousands, maybe tens of thousands, though his mass displacement of people in Pakistan is significant, too. But Woodrow Wilson--that man threw the 20th century into a bloody totalitarian tailspin. It cheapens the prize to give it to an amateur like Obama."

As for the Orwellian-named "peace process" in Palestine-Israel, Mr. Obama has done nothing but enable Israel's massacre on Gaza earlier this year and expanded colonization of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Mr. Obama's rhetoric has been nothing different from that of his predecessor, George W. Bush and has not threatened to cut military welfare from the U.S. to Israel--on which Israel is dependent to perform its atrocities.

"Unless real and deep-rooted change is made in American policy toward recognizing the rights of the Palestinian people I would think such a prize would be useless," Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas prime minister in the Gaza Strip, told reporters after Friday prayers.

Professor Noam Chomsky wrote back in June:

The plans being executed right now are designed to leave Israel in control of the most valuable land in the West Bank, with Palestinians confined to unviable fragments, all separated from Jerusalem, the traditional center of Palestinian life. The “separation wall” also establishes Israeli control of the West Bank aquifer. Hence Israel will be able to continue to ensure that Palestinians receive one-fourth as much water as Israelis, as the World Bank reported in April, in some cases below minimum recommended levels. In the other part of Palestine, Gaza, regular Israeli bombardment and the cruel siege reduce consumption far below.

Obama continues to support all of these programs, and has even called for substantially increasing military aid to Israel for an unprecedented ten years. It appears, then, that Palestinians may be offered fried chicken, but nothing more. Israel’s forced separation of Gaza from the West Bank since 1991, intensified with U.S. support after a free election in January 2006 came out “the wrong way”, has also been studiously ignored in Obama’s “new initiative”, thus further undermining prospects for any viable Palestinian state....

If Obama were serious about opposing settlement expansion, he could easily proceed with concrete measures, for example, by reducing U.S. aid by the amount devoted to this purpose. That would hardly be a radical or courageous move. The Bush I administration did so (reducing loan guarantees), but after the Oslo accord in 1993, President Clinton left calculations to the government of Israel. Unsurprisingly, there was “no change in the expenditures flowing to the settlements”. The Israeli press reported: “[Prime Minister] Rabin will continue not to dry out the settlements,” the report concludes. “And the Americans? They will understand” (Hadashot, Oct. 8; Yair Fidel, Hadashot Supplement, Oct. 29, 1993)....

Obama administration officials informed the press that the Bush I measures are “not under discussion”, and that pressures will be “largely symbolic”. In short, Obama “understands”.

The probable source, Peace Now, which monitors settlement activities, estimates further that the two largest settlements would double in size—Ariel and Ma’aleh Adumim, built mainly during the Oslo years in the salients that subdivide the West Bank into cantons.

Mr. Obama has done nothing more than hypocritically pass a ceremonial resolution at the U.N. Security Council to curb global nuclear proliferation. In fact, the U.S. is expanding its own nuclear production while enabling Israel’s covert proliferation of nuclear weapons and the threat to use them--based on manufactured false allegations--against Iran’s international agency-safeguarded low-enrichment facilities for its nuclear energy program.

Last week, Eli Lake at The Washington Times reported, quoting Administration officials: "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu obtained President Obama’s guarantee that the White House would continue a 4-decade-old secret deal to allow Israel keep a nuclear arsenal without opening it to international inspections."

Mr. Obama has continued economic warfare against the Iranian people while threatening its expansion and a military strike. These threats are illegal were the U.S. to be compliant with international law--"rules that all nations must follow", as Mr. Obama says.

"Ultimately, he may find on his desk a Pentagon proposal for a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities," Mr. Kessler writes. "Or he may get a call from an Israeli prime minister saying such a strike is imminent.... But is it something a Nobel Peace Prize winner would authorize?"

Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.com writes: "On top of that, you’re pushing through Congress a record military spending bill that keeps the U.S. spending more than the top 45 nations on earth combined on weapons and methods of war."

Mr. Obama doesn't deserve to be on a list with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Amnesty International, Carl von Ossietzky, Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. He's better fit for one with mass murderering tyrants like Shimon Peres, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Henry Kissinger. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize puts the president on a list with all of them

How much will you pay me if I read all of this? :)

no, where did you copy and paste it from? it's not like you to do so much research into an issue.

nothing, I put it here so interested parties could read it if they wanted, not to force anyone who doesnt want to read it to.

infoshop.org

Sic - when your steal ...er... plagarize ...er... copy and paste from a source, you really should REFERENCE that source. Don't present it as if it were your own original creation by NOT referencing it. Once again, you prove yourself a twit and keep getting closer to the 'i' becoming an 'a'.

I refuse to do that.

anyway, you would probably be more convincing if you threatened me, then told me to give my father oral sex. sure worked last time, you really put me in my place

I'm not here to defend giving Barrack Obama a Nobel prize for wanting to do things, but there are a few points which I want to make:

1. Leaving Afghanistan now would be worse that finishing the battle.
2. The Afghan war was completely legitimate, because the Taliban was supporting operations against the US.
3. Pakistan's government is under attack from militants, and working with them to keep stability is very justified.
4. Making plans to bomb a country that is developing Multi-Stage Inter-Continental Missiles and Nuclear warheads isn't really in my book a heinious crime.
5. "a ... religious party" Get your religion out of politics. I will not listen to a man in politics to promote a view based on his religion rather than his reason.
6. The measure of how evil a person partaking in war is is not how many die. In WW2 America and her allies killed 12 million, 3 million of them civilians. That doesn't make opposition to Hitler morally wrong.
7. "Taliban spokesman" Being very qualified to comment on violence, but less qualified to comment on peace.
8. "Woodrow Wilson--that man threw the 20th century into a bloody totalitarian tailspin". I'm sorry, but as a description of a man whose mistake was not to force Europe into an American's peace plan, and not to be able to convince America to join the league of nations. Frankly calling that man a mass murdering Tyrant is sickening.
9. Taking a side in the Israel-Palestinian conflict is like cheering for Hitler because he opposed Stalin.
10. "against Iran’s international agency-safeguarded low-enrichment facilities for its nuclear energy program" Was the author on LSD during this bit? Of course Iran has NO INTENTION WHATSOEVER to make Nuclear Weapons. Noooo.....
11. "On top of that, you’re pushing through Congress a record military spending bill that keeps the U.S. spending more than the top 45 nations on earth combined on weapons and methods of war." America is a big country. As a proportion of GDP, they spend 4.06% (2005), putting them in 28th.

The world is so much simpler through the heavy tint of Anarchist glasses. It means that you never even see the dark an nefarious actions of people around the world through want of light, but the shining light of the best deeds of America is dimmed to a wicked, malevolent and evil glow.

*is dimmed

are dimmed

@ Sicarius:

I like the quotation from Anthony Gregory; I tracked down the original. I don't see any reason to think that it was tongue-in-cheek.

I also would like it if you quoted your sources; then I can go there and read more. To just copy and paste the URI would be good enough for me.

@ TGM:

To take the easiest of your anti-‘Anarchist’ points:
2. No, they weren't. Are you confusing the Taliban with Al Qaeda? If you just mean that the Taliban's government was protecting its citizens and legal residents from extradition, do you also believe that the UK should have attacked the U.S. during The Troubles?
4. It is in mine. Or do you think that it's not a crime to bomb the U.S. and the UK? Maybe they're safe because they already built their weapons, but should have been bombed earlier?
5. There are a lot of dumb reasons for party affiliations. The quotation had nothing whatsoever to do with religion.
8. I'm amazed that people still admire Woodrow Wilson. I had more written, but it got too long. Ignore me if you like, but please read about him.

Somebody asked who else should have won; I just ran into this:

http://www.benjaminbradley.com/politics/who-did-obama-beat-to-win-his-nobel-prize/

2. No, they weren't. Are you confusing the Taliban with Al Qaeda? If you just mean that the Taliban's government was protecting its citizens and legal residents from extradition, do you also believe that the UK should have attacked the U.S. during The Troubles?

As I understand it, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are and were closely linked. Am I wrong on this? As for bombing the US during the troubles, I'd have no moral objection to it, but many pragmatic ones.
"4. It is in mine. Or do you think that it's not a crime to bomb the U.S. and the UK? Maybe they're safe because they already built their weapons, but should have been bombed earlier?"
The crime would be to bomb Iran without just cause.
"5. There are a lot of dumb reasons for party affiliations. The quotation had nothing whatsoever to do with religion."

"5. There are a lot of dumb reasons for party affiliations. The quotation had nothing whatsoever to do with religion."

Agreed. That point was tangential, mainly because that is a particular bug-bear of mine.

"8. I'm amazed that people still admire Woodrow Wilson. I had more written, but it got too long. Ignore me if you like, but please read about him."

I'm not necessarily admiring Wilson, being English I know relatively little about most, if not all of the presidents, but that doesn't make him a mass-murdering tyrant.

"but that doesn't make him a mass-murdering tyrant."

Badly phased, should have read "but I'm pretty sure he wasn't a mass murdering tyrant" or similar.

"As I understand it, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are and were closely linked. Am I wrong on this?"

Not even a little bit. The Taliban wasn't even recognized as the government of Afghanistan by most of the world. Even saying they acted as a true governing force is a stretch. Toby Bartels is just being a real tool and taking the side of the Taliban just to take the side of the Taliban.

I take the side of the innocent people of Afghanistan who were bombed. The Taliban themselves are as bad as any other government (recognised and otherwise), actually worse than most today. But that doesn't make it OK to bomb them, much less to bomb the people next to them.

My sense of morality is very different from TheGhostmaker's in this respect.

Indeed it is. I view myself as the most important thing, and if I am under some attack, it is a right of mine to retaliate to it.