700 Billion and 11.3 Trillion Dollars

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I saw an article indicating the bailout, on the low end will cost EVERY man, woman and child about $2500. I think the actual figure will be double that.

I'm hearing people laying the blame on consumers who bought houses, who gave them the money? Back in the day banks where tight with their money, you had to prove you could pay it back. With the loss of regulations and with the fast and loose attitude no one cared if the money ever got paid back. The original lender sold the note in days or weeks to someone else, who quickly sold it again. The originator was long out of the picture when the crap hit the fan.

Now what gets me mad is the fact that my property is now worth less because of the combined actions of buyers and lenders. I want the govt. to step in and shore up the value of my home. I'm being penalized for something I had nothing to do with. Stabilize the housing market and make me whole and I'll be more inclined to support a freebie for the jerks on Wall Street.
 
Watched, Lou Dobbs tonight, the buzz is, some of these $, bails out foreign banks. umm, i don't understand this. alr2903
 
Matt, I totally understand your anger. But in this case, it's not our government who is stepping in and trying to shore up the value of your home. It's Communist China's.

Our trade deficit with China as been running $750-800 billion every year, and with this money the Chinese have been buying up U.S. Treasury bills to the tune of $200,000,000 every business day. This same People's Bank of China also buys $50,000,000 in Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac mortgage-backed bonds every business day.

If asked, Henry Paulson would be obliged to lie about where his orders (to nationalize America's housing and financial services industries) are coming from, but everyone knows where these orders are coming from. He doesn't have $800 billion to loan, but China has ten times that amount -- IN CASH.

 
alr2903,

The shrub plan bails out every fat cat on the planet and leaves the American tax-payers to pay the cost.
Except for those top 5% earners, of course.
Nearly all modern economies trade and exchange with foreign countries, there is nothing unusual about that. The tremendous energies and efforts of the American people have made it possible for this administration to waste money profligately. America buys oil and goods from other countries. Relatively speaking, this country does not export very much. This leads to a massive trade deficit. If those foreign banks weren't willing to keep buying, holding and lending US dollars, the US economy would sink into a very bad depression, at once. Overnight.
Personally, I am troubled by the way this bail-out was written to screw the middle-class taxpayers, reward the young-dynamic-managers and MBA whack-jobs who caused the problem, and do nothing to help those Americans in distress.
People do stupid things, yes. But we can't afford an economy which punishes every horse which fails to cross the finish line first by shooting it.
If things weren't so bad, I'd dig out Regan's comments on the Carter bail-out of Chrysler. Republicans, back then, actually had coherent thought processes on economics.
 
"a flustered rookie playing in a league too high...&quo

McCain Loses His Head

By George F. Will
Tuesday, September 23, 2008; A21

"The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said without even looking around."

-- "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."

To read the Journal's details about the depths of McCain's shallowness on the subject of Cox's chairmanship, see "McCain's Scapegoat" (Sept. 19, Page A22). Then consider McCain's characteristic accusation that Cox "has betrayed the public's trust."

Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in McCain's fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Rep. Cox, who, as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for "dynamic scoring" that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.

In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see The Post of Sept. 17, Page A4; and the New York Times of Sept. 20, Page One.)

By a Gresham's Law of political discourse, McCain's Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a "dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions." This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors "massive government, billions in spending increases."

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain's party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?

On "60 Minutes" Sunday evening, McCain, saying "this may sound a little unusual," said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former governor Mario Cuomo. McCain explained that Cuomo has "respect" and "prestige" and could "lend some bipartisanship." Conservatives have been warned.

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

9-23-2008-08-52-17--gansky1.jpg
 
I love watching Reagan diehards squirm in embarrassment. How many years has George Will been singing the praises of outsourcing, reminding us how wonderful our economy is, and telling us everything will be just fine if we just keep cutting his, er, I mean wealthy people's taxes?

And now, just as Reagan/Bush Sr. managed to quadruple our national debt in 12 years, another trillion dollar consequence of "supply-side" economics is being dumped on the backs of all Americans, rich and poor. And three more generations of our kids and grandkids are being plunged into debt. So instead of working four months out of every year just to pay interest on the national debt, they (and we) are now going to work six to eight months every year to pay this interest.

This isn't a bailout, it's a rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic.
 
I'm confused...

Howis this bail-out going to help the housing market? There's an abundance of available property in St. Louis city that's been foreclosed on.

Unfortunately, it all had a higher value before most of it got trashed by the foreclosed party or broken into by a thief to gut the copper plumbing. There's a cute little house down the street from me for $19,900! I bet it doesn't have plumbing and few that have the money to do the work are going to live there. You can't get a loan buy, rehab, and insure a piece of crap house. I tried and had to resort to family. I'm sure this isn't just a problem in St. Louis.

Why not pay market rate for these properties to these banks and move forward? This loss has to be absorbed by many parties, not just the taxpayer.
 
I also don't see how this bailout will help the average person. OK, it might prevent a recession, but I thought we were already in one. My bad.

Personally, I'm against most credit. If people could lower their expectations and consumption, they wouldn't need so much credit. The one exception is housing - where the price tag is so high that some sort of loan is usually needed. But cars etc... one should save up and buy those for cash (IMHO). But then I've never bought a new car... just a new motorcycle. A one or two year old used car is a much better deal than a new one, anyway. Credit helps mostly the loan companies, anyway. And I think credit is intrinsically inflationary.

Many years ago, when I was in my late teens, I was convinced that another Great Depression was not only possible but unavoidable. Experience since then has shown that an exact repeat of that disaster is unlikely. However, I do think this country is in for even hard economic times until we as a people wake up and devote our energies to constructive employment, not exploitative schemes. And I think our huge national debt and huge imbalance of trade is the ticking time bomb that more than anything else will shake our economy to its foundations. We may see more and more foreign ownership of our real estate and industries... with a resultant stranglehold on our economic power as profits flow increasingly abroad.

Think banana republic. What goes around, comes around.

Not a pretty picture, but it's been a long time developing.
 
Business as usual:

"Discussions on the budget are far overshadowed by the ongoing debate over a $700 billion bailout plan for Wall Street. But the amount of money at stake — including a $488 billion Pentagon funding bill that hasn't seen a second's worth of public debate or review — is almost as great."

BTW this annual Pentagon clusterfuck doesn't include the cost of our Iraq or Afghanistan occupations, which have already cost over a trillion dollars.

 
For those who think in terms of a conspiracy...

There is some rumbling going on that this "crisis" came up when it did to hamstring an Obama presidency. The thinking is the internal polls showed McC loosing, and this action is used to suck all the cash out of the economy so nothing can be accomplished over the next 4 years.

Not sure I buy it, but at this point I wouldn't put anything past the neocons.
 

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