Trump +2 in CNN/ORC National Poll

[SirMuxALot]

One thing I've noticed coming back here from 4 years ago is that there seems to be some undue overconfidence in polling.

Just because we've had 3 presidential cycles in a row where both the projected winner and the margin were fairly close, we think that old polling dragon is slayed forever.

But then we have outcomes like UK'15 and Brexit'16.

And we tell ourselves, "well those Brits don't have the same robust methodology we have over here."  But is that true?

This already is looking like the most volatile year since 1980.  And volatile years tend to trip up the pollsters.  What makes us so sure we can't have a 1980-sized polling miss?

[SirMuxALot]

past two D's have pulled the economy out from recession into (in one case, the best times this country saw in a generation; in the other case, the best that could have been expected given the massive structural obstructions he faced).

"The best that could have been expected".  This sounds an awful lot like unskewing GDP numbers.

[SirMuxALot]

The subprime mortgage crisis was not deregulated into existence.  It was regulated into existence.  Enron-inspired mark to market rules caused forced liquidation of performing mortgages at crisis-inducing prices.  The mark to market rules were well intentioned when passed into law in 2002 (via a 334-90 vote in the House and 97-0 in the Senate, so there is a lot of bipartisan blame here), but they led to huge unintended consequences less than a decade later.  Those accounting rules were the single most significant contributing factor to the crisis.

Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with mortgages or mortgage derivatives.  Glass-Steagall was never fully repealed, in fact.  Most of the law still stands today.  What we usually refer to as Glass-Steagall "repeal" is, in fact, the Gramm Leach Bliley Act, which only allowed partial mixing of commercial and investment banking operations.  The original 1933 Glass-Steagall law already allowed commercial banks to hold mortgage backed securities in their own accounts.

In fact, if all of Glass-Steagall had still been in effect in 2008:
1. B of A could not have legally taken over Merrill Lynch (they were prodded into doing it by the Fed).  
2. JPMorgan could not have taken over Bear Stearns (more prodding by the Fed).
3. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley would not have been legally able to get access to Fed liquidity to save themselves from bankruptcy.

That's potentially *four more* very large bankruptcies that would have happened with full Glass-Steagall in force (or without Gramm Leach Bliley, to look at it another way).

I would like to think Bernanke & Paulson would have found a way to prevent those bankruptcies by...ahem, extra-legal means if necessary, but lawmakers should not rely on that!  They should prefer to have the correct laws/regulations in place instead!

I wish I could wave a magic wand and make all lawmakers (and one retired lawmaker, Barney Frank) understand these facts.  This post-mortem understanding should not be a partisan thing.  We can argue about the degree of regulation necessary (and no, conservatives/Republicans are not anarchists who want no regulation at all), but if such a large number of lawmakers have no desire to understand root causes from both government and private sector, we may be doomed to repeat more severe unintended consequences in the future.

Sorry for the rant...but in this is critical stuff, in my opinion...