> provided confidential mortgage pricing data from Fannie Mae to a principal competitor
It seems like the Fannie Mae data was shared with Freddie Mac. Aren't they both quasi-government organizations? GSEs. So they're both supported by the government but there's a firewall between them to keep some semblance of competition?
Having worked on this data since investors buy the loans, the loan level data by definition needs to be public. Even the borrower information is not secret because real estate ownership is public in USA. So I don’t understand what information it could possibly be other than fraud data. I think sharing fraud data is not colluding.
When Trump was elected I convinced myself it was positive in the way the depression of a business cycle is positive. Sure there is pain but it’s good to cut the strangulation and inefficiency of too much bureaucracy. I hoped this admin would “throw the baby out with the bathwater” more than I’d like. And those differences in opinion are okay and healthy.
But this is just insane. There is no bull case in these actions. None. It’s just outright grift and corruption.
Its wild to me how many people justified his re(!!!)-election on a bunch of hypotheses as if we didn’t have an entire first term of empirical evidence of how he operates.
People are so stupid. I volunteer at a food bank and help give away food to needy people wearing MAGA hats. Crazy. I want to go into snarky mode and say things but I stay professional.
The real question is why was there this hope at all, given Trump has been telling us who he is for decades? Seems like a lot of projection has been going on in the minds of people who voted for him.
These weird trump hagiographies need to go. Its clear he's a failure and a conman and an incredible bigot and awful human being way before 2016, VERY clear in 2016-2020 and inexcusable to vote for him in 2024 or support him in any way, shape, or form in 2025.
I'm outside the US political sphere so might have a different perspective looking in from abroad, but how could anybody possibly have expected anything but just grift and corruption from a second Trump term? There was the whole first term to see that he said one thing and then would act only what ever way benefited his, his family's, and his associates' interests...
From inside the USA, I don’t know. It’s baffling how even in 2015 people expected anything different from the crassest man alive.
Perhaps they thought the grift and corruption would benefit them, and not harm them and thus were okay with it? Like how from the first term someone was quoted saying something along the lines of “they’re not hurting the right people”
In 2015 the democrats chose to go for the 'establishment obvious candidate' despite strong grassroots support for a more populist candidate with a clear track record of working for the best interest of the American People.
They did Bernie dirty, and were lucky to get even as many votes as they did. The email scandal immediately before the election didn't help, but that's more of an excuse for what someone was going to do anyway.
After ~10 years of the current president campaigning both in and out of office. Particularly after Jan 6th. Even more so after congress was too spineless to do their jobs for the people who elected them. NONE of what's happened since really, really, surprises me. Sadden? Disappoint? Dismay? Oh yes, all of those and more. I've been amazed at how fast all that stuff started to happen in the second term. I do totally believe that waste of carbon never read Project 2025 ; just rubber stamping what the rich supporters have asked for.
Looking back further. I'm seriously saddened the Democrats didn't do the right thing for the American People way back in 2008 / 2009. National Single Payer Healthcare. Make healthcare efficient, have competition among providers, but give every person the right to healthcare as part of the social contract and the taxes they pay.
I'm still hopeful that when the pendulum swings back the other way we can end the nightmare of all the damned paperwork and billing and having to do annoying renewals every bloody year.
I think the key reason is that Americans (and Brits) have been lead down the path that all politicans and government in general is corrupt and inefficient, and so it becomes which corrupt person you want in charge. Your guy or the other guy. This is, of course, due to decades of oligarch propaganda. Even otherwise intelligent people think government is the problem and libertarian market forces are the solution. Burn it (government) all down is their end game
Today, all of us have many choices about where we get our news from, and by and large we overwhelmingly choose to listen only to those sources that confirm our existing opinions.
This means that people who voted for Trump are unlikely to ever hear about this sort of corruption, or if they do it will be spun as "his enemies attacking him" or something.
The part you're missing is that a very large number of voters (on both political sides) expect nothing but outright grift and corruption from both parties. And they're not wrong to do so.
Remember, Trump won both times against a candidate who was anointed by the powers that be, not chosen by the people. (Hillary Clinton at least went through the motions of holding primaries, but Kamala Harris didn't even have that).
So people say - out of the two corrupt parties, I might as well vote for the one that isn't actively attacking me.
Keep in mind that Democrats will declare you an outcast if you disagree with any single line of the party agenda - and they're currently pushing at least 3 ideas each of which is strongly rejected by some (independent) fraction of the voterbase.
I agree with the corruption part. After all "drain the swap" was an effective election slogan.
The attack part is just a hyperbole. The leader of MAGA will openly call for people being jailed or primaried if they disagree.
I also get where you are coming from. I have seen this play out 3 times. A non-establishment candidate comes in promising change and removing corruption. Very good at agitation and rousing people by talking about how their government has failed them. Promising to make things better.
But once in power things take a nose dive. The candidate and the party members are even more corrupt. They believe grift and corruption is the norm so there is nothing wrong in being overly and openly corrupt.
And despite the blatant corruption supporters keep making excuses for the behavior. "At least they won against the establishment" or "at least they are in my corner" but often they cannot point to examples to how their lives are better. In most cases they either point to policies which are making lives better for a selected set of people i.e. corruption or just devolve into whataboutism along party lines.
In most cases it takes at about a decade for people to see that their lives aren't any better and this "non-establishment" candidate is even worse. By that time serious damage to the government infrastructure has already been done. There is no coming back.
Sooner or later this behavior will turn US into a third world country where government employees demand bribes openly. But hey, "both parties are corrupt" so why not have partisan and corrupt government employees too.
Neither of those seem like winning moves to me, just stalling moves for the status quo. They are certainly a better choice than Trump obviously, but that isn't very hard and it still doesn't make their own or party priority policies really any better.
The USA isn’t and hasn’t been a republic in quite a long time. The USA is financialist semi-fascist oligarchy, and operates as such regardless of who’s voted into power.
The USA isn’t capitalist, it’s financialist. The dollar is a financial product created via debt issuance.
The USA is semi-fascist as most people in prison aren’t given a trial, there’s a prison industrial complex, police are typically immune from prosecution, and there’s a massive surveillance apparatus that violates US law and human rights. This is wrapped in “patriotism” which is in keeping with fascist modes of propaganda, and the US corporate/state merger is a clear instance of the fascist model.
The US is an oligarchy, and not a republic. No matter who is elected the wars continue, the drug war continues, poverty increases, mass incarceration continues, and so on.
A republic is the “thing of the people”. The people of the USA have very little power over federal policy. The observed function is that a handful of wealthy oligarchs get what they want pretty much every time.
> provided confidential mortgage pricing data from Fannie Mae to a principal competitor
It seems like the Fannie Mae data was shared with Freddie Mac. Aren't they both quasi-government organizations? GSEs. So they're both supported by the government but there's a firewall between them to keep some semblance of competition?
Having worked on this data since investors buy the loans, the loan level data by definition needs to be public. Even the borrower information is not secret because real estate ownership is public in USA. So I don’t understand what information it could possibly be other than fraud data. I think sharing fraud data is not colluding.
If your assessment was correct, then the next question might be: why did these people quit their very cushy jobs?
The article says that they were forced out of their jobs. That could mean many things, but it has a different connotation than quitting
When Trump was elected I convinced myself it was positive in the way the depression of a business cycle is positive. Sure there is pain but it’s good to cut the strangulation and inefficiency of too much bureaucracy. I hoped this admin would “throw the baby out with the bathwater” more than I’d like. And those differences in opinion are okay and healthy.
But this is just insane. There is no bull case in these actions. None. It’s just outright grift and corruption.
This story reminded me of possibly the most succinct comment that I have ever read on this website.
> Trust is efficient.
Politics aside, we should all be dismayed at the USA turning into a low-trust environment. Should we not?
Its wild to me how many people justified his re(!!!)-election on a bunch of hypotheses as if we didn’t have an entire first term of empirical evidence of how he operates.
People are so stupid. I volunteer at a food bank and help give away food to needy people wearing MAGA hats. Crazy. I want to go into snarky mode and say things but I stay professional.
He said he was a POS and you chose to imagine he wasn't.
Everyone around him said how much of an idiot and a POS he is.
What were you thinking? Good job.
The real question is why was there this hope at all, given Trump has been telling us who he is for decades? Seems like a lot of projection has been going on in the minds of people who voted for him.
These weird trump hagiographies need to go. Its clear he's a failure and a conman and an incredible bigot and awful human being way before 2016, VERY clear in 2016-2020 and inexcusable to vote for him in 2024 or support him in any way, shape, or form in 2025.
> It’s just outright grift and corruption.
I'm outside the US political sphere so might have a different perspective looking in from abroad, but how could anybody possibly have expected anything but just grift and corruption from a second Trump term? There was the whole first term to see that he said one thing and then would act only what ever way benefited his, his family's, and his associates' interests...
From inside the USA, I don’t know. It’s baffling how even in 2015 people expected anything different from the crassest man alive.
Perhaps they thought the grift and corruption would benefit them, and not harm them and thus were okay with it? Like how from the first term someone was quoted saying something along the lines of “they’re not hurting the right people”
In 2015 the democrats chose to go for the 'establishment obvious candidate' despite strong grassroots support for a more populist candidate with a clear track record of working for the best interest of the American People.
They did Bernie dirty, and were lucky to get even as many votes as they did. The email scandal immediately before the election didn't help, but that's more of an excuse for what someone was going to do anyway.
After ~10 years of the current president campaigning both in and out of office. Particularly after Jan 6th. Even more so after congress was too spineless to do their jobs for the people who elected them. NONE of what's happened since really, really, surprises me. Sadden? Disappoint? Dismay? Oh yes, all of those and more. I've been amazed at how fast all that stuff started to happen in the second term. I do totally believe that waste of carbon never read Project 2025 ; just rubber stamping what the rich supporters have asked for.
Looking back further. I'm seriously saddened the Democrats didn't do the right thing for the American People way back in 2008 / 2009. National Single Payer Healthcare. Make healthcare efficient, have competition among providers, but give every person the right to healthcare as part of the social contract and the taxes they pay.
I'm still hopeful that when the pendulum swings back the other way we can end the nightmare of all the damned paperwork and billing and having to do annoying renewals every bloody year.
I think the key reason is that Americans (and Brits) have been lead down the path that all politicans and government in general is corrupt and inefficient, and so it becomes which corrupt person you want in charge. Your guy or the other guy. This is, of course, due to decades of oligarch propaganda. Even otherwise intelligent people think government is the problem and libertarian market forces are the solution. Burn it (government) all down is their end game
Today, all of us have many choices about where we get our news from, and by and large we overwhelmingly choose to listen only to those sources that confirm our existing opinions.
This means that people who voted for Trump are unlikely to ever hear about this sort of corruption, or if they do it will be spun as "his enemies attacking him" or something.
I used to be befuddled by this too. Then I lived in the U.S. for a few years.
I think the answer is that the democrats are shockingly bad too, in many parts of the US. People expect grift and corruption from both parties.
Perhaps they didn’t expect the scale of this admin’s grift.
The part you're missing is that a very large number of voters (on both political sides) expect nothing but outright grift and corruption from both parties. And they're not wrong to do so.
Remember, Trump won both times against a candidate who was anointed by the powers that be, not chosen by the people. (Hillary Clinton at least went through the motions of holding primaries, but Kamala Harris didn't even have that).
So people say - out of the two corrupt parties, I might as well vote for the one that isn't actively attacking me.
Keep in mind that Democrats will declare you an outcast if you disagree with any single line of the party agenda - and they're currently pushing at least 3 ideas each of which is strongly rejected by some (independent) fraction of the voterbase.
I agree with the corruption part. After all "drain the swap" was an effective election slogan.
The attack part is just a hyperbole. The leader of MAGA will openly call for people being jailed or primaried if they disagree.
I also get where you are coming from. I have seen this play out 3 times. A non-establishment candidate comes in promising change and removing corruption. Very good at agitation and rousing people by talking about how their government has failed them. Promising to make things better.
But once in power things take a nose dive. The candidate and the party members are even more corrupt. They believe grift and corruption is the norm so there is nothing wrong in being overly and openly corrupt.
And despite the blatant corruption supporters keep making excuses for the behavior. "At least they won against the establishment" or "at least they are in my corner" but often they cannot point to examples to how their lives are better. In most cases they either point to policies which are making lives better for a selected set of people i.e. corruption or just devolve into whataboutism along party lines.
In most cases it takes at about a decade for people to see that their lives aren't any better and this "non-establishment" candidate is even worse. By that time serious damage to the government infrastructure has already been done. There is no coming back.
Sooner or later this behavior will turn US into a third world country where government employees demand bribes openly. But hey, "both parties are corrupt" so why not have partisan and corrupt government employees too.
That is very understandable, and the chant of "they're all the same" is common in other countries too.
But, noone was as bad a president as Trump in recent decades, as shown by his approval during the first term, so the re-election is still baffling.
The information bubble, coupled with terrible democrats' strategy, seems a better explanation of the election results, IMHO.
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The only winning move was not to play.
No I think voting for Hillary or Harris was the winning move.
Just like voting for somebody else will be the next winning move.
Neither of those seem like winning moves to me, just stalling moves for the status quo. They are certainly a better choice than Trump obviously, but that isn't very hard and it still doesn't make their own or party priority policies really any better.
I will never understand this kind of pathetic negativity.
What does it mean to not play and how is that winning?
We have centuries of examples of participation working. It’s obvious that you can win by playing.
I didn’t vote for him. Doesn’t take much reading comprehension to glean that from my original comment.
> Doesn’t take much reading ...
Not whole lot of room for that when you're foaming at the mouth, ready to repeat packaged PR narratives made by very well paid DC people.
It's hard to have reflection and discourse when both parties can be so negative and polarizing.
Nowhere do I mention whether or not you voted for him.
> threatens the republic
The USA isn’t and hasn’t been a republic in quite a long time. The USA is financialist semi-fascist oligarchy, and operates as such regardless of who’s voted into power.
ok comrade
Well, to steel man this a bit, Citizen’s United codified unlimited spending on political causes by nearly anyone.
John Sirota has spent quite a bit of effort on journalism on this subject.
Ideas exist between those two extremes. You really don't become a communist by pointing out issues with unconstrained capitalism.
No, I'm insulting the edgelord response of "we're aktually an olIGarChY!!!!11!" which adds nothing.
The preferred response is to downvote and move on.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
So, I was quite specific.
The USA isn’t capitalist, it’s financialist. The dollar is a financial product created via debt issuance.
The USA is semi-fascist as most people in prison aren’t given a trial, there’s a prison industrial complex, police are typically immune from prosecution, and there’s a massive surveillance apparatus that violates US law and human rights. This is wrapped in “patriotism” which is in keeping with fascist modes of propaganda, and the US corporate/state merger is a clear instance of the fascist model.
The US is an oligarchy, and not a republic. No matter who is elected the wars continue, the drug war continues, poverty increases, mass incarceration continues, and so on.
A republic is the “thing of the people”. The people of the USA have very little power over federal policy. The observed function is that a handful of wealthy oligarchs get what they want pretty much every time.
The DNC isn't any better and if you think it is you're just as stupid as everyone else.
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