bailouts

[Mississippi Steve]

In the spirit of Live Aid, and Farm Aid, I'm really surprised that with their overblown sense of importance...that Hollywood hasn't organized a Financial-Aid' concert to help cure the financial ills of the world. Would fit in nicely with their 'green' philosophy, lol.

THat makes too much sense..... but even as misguided as most of the Hollywood types, they have figured out that the bailout is nothing but smoke and mirrors and is going to do nothing but bankrupt the federal government.

Mississippi Steve Reviewed by Mississippi Steve on 09-22-2008. bailouts know what pisses me off more is that both the dems, reps, and president are giving our money away to bad business ethic money waisting criminals. everyone thats scared of socialist b.s.. some of americas biggest firms are now socialized with the government taking the bill one of the worst thing about this is the ceo's and big wigs of the companies are goin to get their multi million dollar bonuses still. so they run companies into the ground with bad practices and still get their Rating: 5

[The Figment]

could u please provide the source of this, citations will help to verify if this is actually what is in the proposal. i know dems have so far put up a fight to make sure there is independent oversight and taxpayer protection, but if this is whats being sent to congress to be voted on... i must say its just such a shame...

lol how old is that CRT... i got a similar crappy box! keep it for a few more years and we may get paid more than what we paid for them antiques & collectibles of the digital era!

Lol...Thats my $9 Thrift Store CRT!! (Yes as you can see it still works) I used it for a year or so before I fianally broke down and got myself a Acer 19' LCD Monitior!! And "Section Eight" of the "Bailout Plan" is available at most News Sites. (FOX CNN Bloomberg)

[killerweed420]

Elect Ron Paul and he'll just default on all the Chinese loans. What are they going to do? Repossess the US?

[daihashi]

Elect Ron Paul and he'll just default on all the Chinese loans. What are they going to do? Repossess the US?

They will cut us off from their exports (or additionally tax the hell out of our exports to them or not even allow them in) and our economy will be even more in the crapper. Defaulting our loans that the Chinese own is a horrible idea. Not to mention the hostilities we would endure from China and it's allies.. possibly resulting in War.

I certainly hope that's not what Ron Paul would do.

[dragonrider]

I AM PISSED LIVID ABOUT THIS FUCKING BAILOUT!!!!!

I cannot believe how fucking incompetent our goddam government is! How is it we can have our president saying the economy is fundamentaly strong and we are not even in a recession one day, and then have the Treasury Secretary tell Congress on Friday that if we don't get a plan together for a $700 BILLION bailout by Monday, the entire banking system will collapse and we will face a FUCKING DEPRESSION????

How does a FUCKING DEPRESSION sneak up on you like that?

This president has appointed the most incompetent boobs ever to run our country!

Heckuva Job Brownie sat on his ass while the Katrina drowned New Orleans.

Heckuva Job Rummy sat on his ass while Iraq went into the toilet.

Now we have Heckuva Job Bernie at the Federal Reserve and Heckuva Job Pauli at Treasury, and they sat on their asss while a FUCKING DEPRESSION sneaked up on us to the point where if we don't come up with $700 BILLION over the weekend, the world economy might actually tank?

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WITH THESE GODDAM IMBECILES???????

[daihashi]

I AM PISSED LIVID ABOUT THIS FUCKING BAILOUT!!!!!

I cannot believe how fucking incompetent our goddam government is! How is it we can have our president saying the economy is fundamentaly strong and we are not even in a recession one day, and then have the Treasury Secretary tell Congress on Friday that if we don't get a plan together for a $700 BILLION bailout by Monday, the entire banking system will collapse and we will face a FUCKING DEPRESSION????

How does a FUCKING DEPRESSION sneak up on you like that?

This president has appointed the most incompetent boobs ever to run our country!

Heckuva Job Brownie sat on his ass while the Katrina drowned New Orleans.

Heckuva Job Rummy sat on his ass while Iraq went into the toilet.

Now we have Heckuva Job Bernie at the Federal Reserve and Heckuva Job Pauli at Treasury, and they sat on their asss while a FUCKING DEPRESSION sneaked up on us to the point where if we don't come up with $700 BILLION over the weekend, the world economy might actually tank?

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WITH THESE GODDAM IMBECILES???????

To be fair this is a problem that many politicians have been avoiding for a long while now.

Bush #41 didn't do anything about it
Clinton didn't do anything about it
and "W" didn't do anything about it.

It's been well known for a while that these industries were at potential risk and needed restructuring..

however you and I are in agreement. I am very pissed at the government right now for their incompetence and just being so nonchalant about this whole thing as if it wasn't that big of a deal.

GRRRR!!!!

[dragonrider]

Ugh.. I'm sick of this crap too. I don't think we should be bailing out these companies who put themselves in the hole. The problem is that these companies are so intertwined with our economy that if they go down so does our economy. We would bounce back... no doubt about it, but it would be very hard times for a while.

Personally I'd be willing to deal with hard times as opposed to giving the impression to these companies that it's ok to be corrupt and run their company into the ground.. because the government will save them.

Yes, exactly, the problem is that if these companies go down, then we all go down. This is the flaw in the deregulatory philosophy. The philosophy is that regulation strangles the risk-taking that drives the economy --- and in return for loose regulation, the companies themselves will take responsibility for their decisions. If the risks pay off, they get the profit, but if the risk goes bad, they take the losses (according to how deregulation is always sold to us) But the flaw is that when those risks do go bad, they DON'T take responsibility. They know the truth is that we cannot afford to let them fail, so we will pcik up the tab for the bad decisions while they walk away with the profit for the good decisions. They have us over the barrel and they are fucking us all the way to the bank.

Agreed. Where has my country, party, gone?

Your party has abandoned all of its principles, and has driven your country into a fucking toilet. You can find your country in the sewer, and you can find your party in the driver's seat.

Agreed.

I'll take a few months of hardship for that. bailing them out gives a VERY bad message that the government will be the safety net when you choose to run a company into the ground because of your own greed.

I think maybe you are misunderstanding what is at stake. We aren't talking about a few months hardship here. The bailout will be a few months hardship --- your share is $3000, and you should be able to get that together in a few months I imagine. The alternative is a banking collapse and a Depression. The last one of those lasted more than 10 years and resulted in many people losing absolutely everything. People starved to death. I think that is what they are talking about here. If it was a few months hardship, then I'd definitely be for letting these companies bear the responsibility they deserve. But I think we are talking about something a lot more serious than that.

[dragonrider]

This biggest bailout and nationalization in human history comes from the most fanatically and ideologically zealot free-market laissez-faire administration in US history. These are the folks who for years spewed the rhetoric of free markets and cutting down government intervention in economic affairs. But they were so fanatically ideological about free markets that they did not realize that financial and other markets without proper rules, supervision and regulation are like a jungle where greed â?? untempered by fear of loss or of punishment â?? leads to credit bubbles and asset bubbles and manias and eventual bust and panics....

...Like scores of evangelists and hypocrites and moralists who spew and praise family values and pretend to be holier than thou and are then regularly caught cheating or cross dressing or found to be perverts these Bush hypocrites who spewed for years the glory of unfettered wild west laissez faire jungle capitalism (and never believed in any sensible and appropriate regulation and supervision of financial markets) allowed the biggest debt bubble ever to fester without any control, have caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and are now forced to perform the biggest government intervention and nationalizations in the recent history of humanity

I did not agree with everything in the article, but this part I agreed with. The laissez-faire free-market bullshit is based on the idea that everyone takes responsibility for themselves, even big compaines. But we see that is not the case. Instead these companies are "too big to fail," so if it looks like they are going to fail, WE have to take the responsibility.

Let's not forget that next time. It is TRUE --- these companies ARE too big to fail. We have a stake in their well being, so we need to keep an eye on what they are doing. We need to exercise enough oversight to prevent them from getting into the situation in which they need to come to us for $700 BILLION overnight.

I also agreed with the part of the article that pointed to the hypocrisy of pure laissez-faire free-market ideology. This kind of philosophy gets applied all the way up and down the economic spectrum, including all they way down to inidviduals. YOU are expected to take respnisibility for your own life and not ask for a handout from anyone, especially not the government or your fellow taxpayers.

If YOU lose your job, you are on your own. Don't come to the government. YOU take responsibiltiy and get another job.

If YOU get sick without healthcare, you are on your own. Don't come to the government. YOU take responsibiltiy and pay for it yourself.

If YOU get caught in a mortgage you can't pay, you are on your own. Don't come to the government. YOU take responsibiltiy and either pay or lose your house.

The differrence between YOU and these investment banks and insurance companies is that YOU are not too big to fail. YOU can fail and everyone else will be fine. No one needs to bail YOU out, because YOU are expendable.

But these companies are NOT expendable. YOU need to take responsibility for both THEM and YOURSELF! So pay up, Mr. Expendable!

[GoldenBoy812]

At first glance, this looks like a bail out of big business, at the expense of the American tax payer. But lets take a much more detailed look at the situation.

Most economic experts (Keynesian college professors etc...) will pertain to the deregulation of the banking industry as the main reason these large investment firms have failed. They will tell you its the lack of regulation in the banking industry that caused this mess.

But tell me, what exactly is/was the Community Reinvestment Act? Am I wrong, or does that sound very much like a government regulation, that calls for an ease of risk management practices, as to act in the interest of non discriminatory lending. Meaning, this act is calling for banks and lenders alike to issue loans to people who ordinarily would have been discriminated based on their credit rating. Because a higher % of people who are credit deficient are of minority status, Jesse Jackson then made it a political issue. With Jackson's help, lending institutions relaxed their lending standards and began issuing high risk mortgages rather than be labeled "racist" or "discriminatory".

Fast forward to 2007, and the sub prime crisis arises out of the loins of the Community Reinvestment Act. All high scale investment banks at the time were heavily leveraged in these investments, which has caused the collapse of ALL main street investment banking (Morgan Stanly and Goldman Sachs are no longer investment institutions but regular old banks).

So I the question: Was it the deregulation or the regulation that help cause the collapse of the US financial sector? Was the CRA not on the same level as over site? Does regulation defined by only disallowance, and deregulation defined by only allowance? I was always taught that regulation was government intervention into the economy, and that deregulation was government not intervening in the economy.

One thing is for certain, the federal government has been intervening with the economy for nearly 100 years, and Keynesian practices have done very little to eliminate recession but very much to devalue or debase our currency.

[dragonrider]

With this bailout fiasco, I think McCain's statement at the begining of last week that the "fundamentals of the economy are strong" is going to hang around his neck like a dead albatros for the rest of the campaign.

Fanny and Freddie had been bailed out the week before for $200 billion, Lehman Brothers had gone bankrupt, Bear Stearns sold to Wells at firesale prices, and AIG was in trouble. McCain said, the "fundamentals of the economy are strong." Within a day or two we are bailing out AIG for $85 billion. And by the end of the week the treasury secretary is saying we need $700 billion more or the whole economy will collapse!

McCain is even more oblivious than Bush if he thinks the fundamentals of the economy are strong when we are BORROWING A TRILLION DOLLARS in two weeks to keep our economy from a complete meltdown!

What an ass!

Later he said he meant the "American Worker" is strong and workers are the fundamentals of the economy. He's a boob. That's is not what the term "fundamentals" means when you are talking about the "fundamentals of the economy." The "fundamentals of the economy" are measurable yardsticks by which you measure the economy --- things like growth in GDP, strength of the dollar versus other currencies, inflation and things that drive it like energy costs, interests rates, consumer confidence, unemployment rates, job creation rates, durable goods orders, etc. It's not some vague thing like "the American Worker."

If McCain doen't even understand what these terms mean, he has no business even talking about it. Almost all of these true "fundamentals of the economy" are trending down. We have some serious problems. It's either incompetence or a lie to look at those numbers in the same week we are having a true economic crisis and say the "fundamentals of the economy are strong."

McCain either truly has no idea at all what he is talking about, or he is lying to our faces.