Posted on 04/20/2008 1:17:11 PM PDT by The_Republican
The description of the Fed as the "lender of last resort" is accurate without being informative. Lender to whom? For what purposes? Last resort before what?
Did the bank "lend" $29 billion to Bear Stearns, or did it, in effect, buy some of the most problematic securities owned by Bear? If so, was this faux "loan" actually to J.P. Morgan Chase? The purpose of the money was to give Morgan an incentive to buy Bear -- at a price so low that an incentive should have been superfluous.
In 1979, when the government undertook to rescue Chrysler, conservatives worried not that the bailout would fail but that it would work, thereby inflaming government's interventionist proclivities and lowering public resistance to future flights of Wall Street socialism.
It "worked": Chrysler has survived to endure its current crisis. The fallacious argument in 1979 was that Chrysler was then "too big to be allowed to fail."
Today's argument is that Bear Stearns was so connected to the financial system in opaque ways that no one could guess the radiating consequences of its failure -- the financial consequences or, which sometimes is much the same thing, psychological.
But what is now the principle by which other distressed firms will elicit Fed interventions in future uncertainties? By what criteria does Washington henceforth determine whether a large entity is "too connected to fail"?
The Fed has no mandate to be the dealmaker for Wall Street socialism.
The Fed's mission is to preserve the currency as a store of value by preventing inflation. Its duty is not to avoid a recession at all costs; the way to get a big recession is to engage in frenzied improvisations because a small recession, aka a correction, is deemed intolerable.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
Very true. I consider the Fed one of those necessary evils because we don't live in an economically closed society. It has long since overstepped its bounds of being 'the bank's bank'.
I don’t know what went on in the background, but it’s evident that the Powers That Be decided to punish Bear Stearns and reward Morgan Stanley.
Wasn’t it Morgan Stanley that lost the most players in 2001?
/johnny
You mean reward JP Morgan.
I believe the reason the Fed tapped JPM, and no one else, was because JPM has 71 T, yes T as in trillion, dollars of derivatives that would be at risk of failure if Bear went under, as Bear was the counterpart to a lot of it.
I should have said JP Morgan. See #7.
Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca was paid $ 1 a year and perhaps performance bonuses. I remember the $1 a year.
If there are no sacrifices by the people in charge then IMO, it really is socialize the risk, privatize the reward.
But hey! with tax breaks for offshoring, OPIC, Ex-Im Bank, World Bank MIGA, taxes greatly reduced to let corps repatriate hundreds of billions of dollars -- it's socialism. But don't give 'dem $15/hour workers one extra week of unemployment, ya hear!
Just in case there are questions here's a source.
the American Jobs Creation Act, 2005
"U.S. companies pulling back overseas profits normally pay 35 percent of that amount in taxes to the U.S. Treasury, on top of whatever taxes they pay in the countries where the profits were earned. The AJCA temporarily reduced that rate to just 5.25 percent."
the American Jobs Creation Act? We don't gotta create no stinkin' jobs
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