I don’t even completely agree with Chris Hedges’ critique of the financial system — I think he overstates the zombie bank/toxic asset thing — but Bieber-damn, this is one satisfying smackdown of CNBC CBC douchebag Kevin O’Leary (what the fuck is up with that clown’s accent, btw)?
Update. Okay, O’Leary is Canadian…that accent still sounds weird to me.
BBA
CBC, not CNBC. The accent is Canadian.
jpe
The US is the only country that’s ever had a firewall between commercial and investment banking. Canada didn’t break down their walls because they never had them in the first place.
Comrade Mary
CBC, yeah. Sorry. The accent is pure hoser-douchebag, to be precise. I’ll take asshole Don Cherry over asshole Kevin O’Leary any time, because this psychopath is being embraced by the media as our adorable financial equivalent of Simon Cowell. Feh!
I rarely watch the Lang-O’Leary Exchange just because head-exploding makes such a mess, but I happened to catch this writer’s appearance and was first appalled by O’Leary’s vile little claim that climate change had been debunked, complete with slap at Al Gore, and then proud of the graceful and effective comeback by Turner that let him keep on message and turning back O’Leary’s specious claims rather than wrestling in the mud. (He got a fair hearing on this show.)
I love the smackdowns when they happen, but I appreciate getting the message out despite distractions, too.
arguingwithsignposts
@BBA: Yeah, I saw that clip somewhere else. Definitely CBC.
jl
@BBA: But, Canadians don’t have accents. They just talk boring and say ‘eh’ a lot.
Wannabe Speechwriter
I’m worried the US is now facing competition in the right-wing TV doucebags market…
arguingwithsignposts
@Wannabe Speechwriter: I’d laugh my ass off if Limbaugh’s job got outsourced to a low-wage third-world nation.
PIGL
Yes, I am ashamed to say that we Canadians have as many total douche-bag criminals in three-piece suits per square kilometer of financial district as do you Americans. This piece of work made his fortune defrauding Mattel Inc. Under a Conservative (== Republican) government, this successful piece of looting qualifies him as a respectable entrepreneur whose views must be broadcast to our respectful ears. Think of him as our very own Donald Trump.
This event has caused quite an uproar in Canada. Nobody supports him except the rich and powerful and their media operations dedicated to the destruction of the CBC, so I expect he’ll be getting his comeuppance any day now.
(He is nothing but a loud-mouthed shnook.)
smintheus
“Very low budget” protests?! What can you say?
Comrade Mary
The interview I mentioned: it may or may not be viewable outside of Canada. There may be ads at the beginning, but if and when it loads, scroll to the 49 minute mark.
cokane
Hedges let that clown get to him, seemed to take him way off his game.
Comrade Mary
@smintheus: See? As PIGL said, Trump without the combover.
Comrade Mary
Fuck it, I’ll just keep pimping Chris Turner to wash the bad taste of O’Leary out of my mind. Here’s his TED Calgary talk.
Maude
@arguingwithsignposts:
I can’t remember the country he came back from with the v stuff. It would be great if his job went there, without him.
Dougerhead
@cokane:
Really? I like Hedges a lot but this is by far the best I’ve seen him in an interview. That idiot was a perfect foil for Hedges’ slightly over-the-top analysis.
MikeJ
Canadian? Does this guy control a hockey team with a organ in the basement of Elsinor brewery?
Comrade Mary
When every word you speak is strained through a mouthful of shit, of course you’re going to sound weird.
Dave Ruddell
MikeJ, that guy was Swedish, not Canadian!
jl
@PIGL: Thanks for the info on this CBC interviewer. Looks like he has an interesting history.
Wikipedia says this about the incident:
” CBC’s ombudsman found O’Leary’s behaviour to be a violation of the public broadcaster’s journalistic standards. ”
Huh, Canadian news organizations have ombudspeople who render judgment on conservatives? Odd. Trying to wrap my head around that concept.
Warren Terra
O’Leary makes an excellent point that Hedges was wrong to be upset about being called a nutcase when he was quite innocuously gifted with the appellation nutbar.
jl
Wiki says O’Leary grew up in a suburb of Montreal. maybe he picked up a slight Canadian French accent?
Thomas
@jl:
It was amazing to see them actally give the guest a chance to speak without shouting over him. If that had been on Faux News the host would have pressed that crap point about not driving in a car today to the point of absurdity and cut off the rest of the topic (because I guess humans didn’t produce and consumer goods before the corporate form or something).
cokane
@Dougerhead: Just felt like Hedges spent too much admonishing him and less time making points he could have made. It was great shit talk I suppose, but it didn’t really help advance the goals Hedges seemed to be pursuing by appearing on the show.
Wannabe Speechwriter
@arguingwithsignposts: I’m sure there are fat dumb Latvians willing to yell racist shit on the radio for a fraction of what it costs to do that with Limbaugh…
Dongo
That would be the “intolerable asshole” accent. It’s surprisingly common on television.
Alison
@cokane: If the guy wasn’t being a giant name-calling juvenile douche, Hedges probably would have spent less time admonishing him.
That whole “I didn’t call you a nutcase, I called you a nutBAR” thing made me wonder if he was a ventriloquist’s dummy being operated by a six year old.
Peter
Jesus Christ. I promise, the CBC is not usually that bad. What an embarrassment.
Buffalo Rude
Actually its probably understated. Banks don’t have to “mark to market” the real time value of their loan portfolios. For example: A $500,000 loan against a now $250,000 house is not going to be worth even the base amount of the loan for decades – probably long past the term of the mortgage and long past the borrower realizing that lighting money on fire is not a prudent way to build equity in an investment. If the TBTF banks made their books reflect the current and actual market value of their mortgage assets, they’d be out of business in a heartbeat.
And that’s not even getting into the buy-back clauses contained in a lot of the mortgage backed securities sold by banks. Wherein they would have to buy-back – at the price the security was initially sold for – their bonds if it could be proven the contract was broken; mainly due to lack of “due diligence” by the bank against the borrower, but fraud also. And there is lots of that at almost every level of the criminal enterprise known as the housing bubble.
Then there is the problem of the REO stock already “owned” by the bank, except thanks to questionable chains of assignments and fraudulent foreclosure practices the titles to those properties are unmarketable (read: unsellable without a lot of expensive and time consuming legal work).
jl
I think Hedges would have spent the time better by sticking to issues, rather than taking offense. The interviewer was being so silly that taking offense to it gave the interviewer’s juvenile display too much importance.
Edit: point being that if Hedges had not taken it so personally, he could have just made a little fun of the offensive remarks and used the time to educate the audience.
But, Hedges was clearly ticked off, and his reaction was natural, at least for a human being.
ornery
That thing you see that resembles a person wearing a perpetual sneer, folks, is the product of having too much money.
It’s ugly and people turn away, when they should stop and really see what over-wealth costs its victims.
different-church-lady
Please tell me he didn’t bring Karl Marx into this.
Please tell that didn’t happen.
Roger Moore
@Buffalo Rude:
And even if the title is clear, most of those REOs are marked at the inflated value from when the loan was made, not the current market value. That’s part of the reason banks are so reluctant to sell; they have to stop pretending their houses are worth 2007 prices. So unsold REO is basically a junk asset rather than a junk loan.
different-church-lady
@PIGL:
Now that is some hot sleasebag-on-sleasebag action!
cleek
@different-church-lady:
yeah, that was a bit of a bad way to go.
jl
@Buffalo Rude: I agree. Calculated risk has been discussing the problem of overvalued bank assets periodcically. Here is a post from 2009
NY Times Example of a Toxic Asset
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/02/ny-times-example-of-toxic-asset.html
Calculated risk sees securities with a 3 percent discount from face value that should have up to 50 percent discount.
I’ve seen some graphs that compare the total reported book value of mortgages and mortgage backed seucurities, and the value of the US housing stock. The market value of the housing stock dove after 2008, but the reported book value of the bank portfolios hung up in the air. But cannot find any of them now. Anyone has a link to such a graph, please post it!
That idea that the TBTF banks would not be required to take losses is the whole idea behind the ‘pretend and extend’ policy: pretend that value of the bank portfolios of mortgages and mortgage backed securities are what the banks want them to be, and extend these bad assets until the real economy has ‘caught up’ to support the banks’ securities valuations the banks need to be for them to solvent.
Problems are that even if the real economy did have a strong recovery, the valuations are probably unrealistic anyway, and the damage done to the real economy from supporting invsolvent banks prevents a strong recovery.
Edit: or is it ‘extend and pretend’? Extend the life of the banks’ bad assets on the banks books and pretend the banks are solvent. I forget which it is. Doesn’t make much difference in what happens. Except the first version imputes honesty to the proceedings (which might dupe rubes like many economists), while the second does not.
I think Hedges was right to emphasize this policy as a major source of trouble.
AMD
Wow, I need a cigarette.
This is a perfect illustration why so many Fox News pundits don’t let “the other side” get a word in edgewise.
PIGL
@ornery: I came up with what I think is an absolutely fabulous characterisation of such peoples visages, inspired by Gwynn Morgan, a libertarian fcuk-weasel with a pissing-post in the “business” section of the Toronto Globe and Mail. I described it thus:
The Québecois have a shorter: têtes à clacques, which means heads fit only for being whacked with something hard, sharp and painful.
Mark
Thanks, great interview–don’t know what you’re talking aboot with the accent though, didn’t hear nothing eh.
Hoodie
The guy from CBC is a douche but, if this is any example, Chris Hedges is a shitty spokesman for OWS. This schmuck O’Leary is a lightweight compared with the FNC types in the US, so Hedges wasn’t particularly impressive in losing his cool over a few playground taunts that he could have easily deflected or turned against the interviewer. He also makes a bunch of unforced rhetorical errors, including engaging in an unfocused broadside against corporations, which he has to later qualify by saying he means financial corporations. Another unforced error is dragging in Karl Marx who, while being an originator of a valuable analytical framework, is a nineteenth century figure who in many ways is irrelevant to modern economics, and the citing of which opens one up too easily to being called a “nutbar”. Finally, Hedges comes across as a pissed off guy with a sinus infection. Sorry, I don’t see this as a particularly satisfying smackdown.
Tony J
@different-church-lady:
Why shouldn’t he? It might sound bizarre to an American’s ears, but when you’re talking about the social effects of unregulated capitalism Karl Marx was basically right. I’m quite willing to denounce Stalin if you need me to. Karl would have.
MacKenna
What’s highly amusing is Canada’s wingnuts are constantly attacking the underfunded CBC, calling it a leftwing broadcaster when it’s been dumbed down and contracts with assholes like O’Learly and Rex Murphy (another douchebag). CBC is MSM now. There are very few investigative journalists left.
Dougerhead, you might want to read Griftopia before concluding Hedges hasn’t got Wall Street criminality right. And this is worth a follow. http://dailybail.com/
different-church-lady
@Tony J:
I usually try eschew this term, but… “optics”.
Yeah, Marx may have been right, but if you’re even slightly associated with the left there’s no quicker way to help someone paint you as a left-wing caricature short of handing them a brush.
Or, to put it better, what Hoodie said.
MacKenna
Wall Street 2012 campaign contributions so far:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/the-big-wall-street-banks-are-already-trying-to-buy-the-2012-election
Mitt Romney: $813,300
Barack Obama: $198,874
Tim Pawlenty: $101,515
Rick Perry: $58,900
Jon Huntsman: $28,250
Ron Paul: $13,104
Herman Cain: $2,715
Michelle Bachmann: $1,500
Newt Gingrich: $1,250
different-church-lady
@Hoodie: Sadly I have to agree with you. (And thanks for saving me the trouble of thinking that through so I could type it out.)
There’s only one way this could be seen as a smackdown and that’s if you’re already in the
choruschoir. And hell, I’m on Hedges’ side.Tony J
@different-church-lady:
Meh. I get what you mean, but it’s not like that everywhere, and anyway, fuckem.
YMMV. And that’s fine.
different-church-lady
@Tony J: Yes, perhaps it’s a uniquely American reaction. But Wall Street is in America, so…
Hoodie
@different-church-lady: Stiglitz is an example of a much more effective advocate, but Hedges is the type of guy that FoxNews types like to interview because he’s easy to ridicule. Hell, Jesse La Greca over at Daily Kos is a better advocate. And it’s not just “optics” per se. Marx was a valuable analyst but his name has become inextricably attached to horrific totalitarian regimes that are as much as or more sociopathic than modern glibertarians. Marx profoundly fucked up in the theory/praxis area, and the results were awful and cannot be decoupled from his analyses very cleanly. You can find a raft of more modern economists whose writings include insights along the lines of, say, Marx’s labor theory of surplus value, but who don’t have the baggage.
Katie5
Lang frequently has the very smart putdown but it gets lost amidst the douchiness. Too polite for his bully mentality.
If you think O’Leary’s an obnoxious jerk on this program, you should see him on Dragon’s Den. [email protected]#*@% hole.
different-church-lady
@Hoodie: It doesn’t have as much to do with what Marx did or didn’t do so much as it’s that Hedges seemed to have no idea it wouldn’t play well.
Katie5
@PIGL: Têtes à claques is awesome. O’Leary might be from here but he’d not last a minute if he was paired up with a Montreal or QC francophone host.
Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water
On behalf of myself and the other Canucks here, I apologise for dickheads like O’Leary. On the other hand, there is Rick Mercer
Nutella
Hedges wasn’t exactly a font of eloquence but compared to a clown whose most devastating point was to call him a left-wing nutbar he’s way out in front rhetorically.
Dougerhead
@Nutella:
He’s never a font of eloquence (I love the guy, but he’s not), so this is a perfect venue for him.
i”m going to keep linking to Hedges’ stuff even though I don’t agree with all of it and I don’t think he’s that eloquent because someone should be saying what he’s saying, and no one else is.
Mark
That was great!
Nutella
Speaking of toxic assets, a case in Massachusetts a week ago seems to have thrown a lot of property ownership in limbo. In Bevilacqua vs Rodriguez, Bevilacqua bought a foreclosed property, converted it to condos, and then sold some of the condos. When it turned out that the original foreclosure had been improperly handled nobody knew who owned it. So Bevilacqua attempted to clear it up by suing Rodriguez (the former owner who had been foreclosed). The supreme court of Mass. ruled that Bevilacqua has no standing to sue so the ownership of the property cannot be resolved.
Two takes on it: Realtors trying to be soothing. and Nonrealtors getting excited. The soothing realtors seem to be saying that the best thing to do is wait the three years required in Mass for property to change hands by ‘physically entering the property’. In other words, the best thing they can fall back on is squatting.
Anyone know more about this? Or cases in other states?
Edo
@Wannabe Speechwriter: And alas, you would be right.
HyperIon
@cokane made a remark on Hedges: Hedges does not mince words and seldom misses an opportunity to fight back. And Leary is the Dragon’s Den asshole. Hedges was actually a lot lower key than I have ever heard him be. I loved him removing his earpiece while saying “it’s the last time i’ll ever appear here.” he has other venues to fry his fish in.
HyperIon
BTW both Shelia Bair (former FDIC chair?) and the Baseline Scenarios guy Simon Johnson were scathing on C-SPAN this week (and it was shown this weekend).
Simon Johnson was pretty scary at the same time (shorter version “get ready for amaggedon). Someone accused HIM of being a left wing wacko and he immediately rejoined “i am the former INSERT IMPORTANT POSITION HERE at IMF and they have specific tests to insure that no left wing wacko ever gets that job”. then he eviscerated right wingers.
double nickel
The CBC Ombudsperson took O’Leary to task for that little episode, giving him a pretty good public spanking within days. Sadly our current neocon federal government has embarked on a mission to defund the CBC (which is an arms’s length Crown Corporation), cause yanno…the private sector can do things so much better, right?
Deb T
Thanks for the video. I don’t get cable and rely on my friendly blogs to excerpt what I need to see. Chris Hedges does a great job here.