Posted on 07/16/2010 2:20:16 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Beware the revisionists. It was bound to happen eventually, but here we are, less than two years after the U.S. faced its worst financial crisis in decades, and a steady stream of politicians routinely take to the airwaves to declare that the government overreacted with the $700 billion TARP plan and ripped off the taxpayer. That the incredible interventions by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury weren't necessary. That we should have taken our lumps and let the chips fall where they may.
Yeah, right. Jimmy Dunne, senior managing principal at investment-banking firm Sandler O'Neill, summed up my feelings perfectly when I asked him recently what he thought of those politicians: "They're idiots," he said.
Dunne is one of many who watched the meltdown from a courtside seat. "You had to be at your desk every day, but there was just this feeling of hopelessness, like there was nothing you could do," he says of those dark days in the fall of 2008. "You just had this feeling in your stomach that if the government didn't stand up and say, 'We will be there,' the whole thing would be crumbling down."
Why would things crumble? Because our financial system is one that operates on the idea of faith. Faith that institutions will back their promises, that people will pay their bills. And this nation went through a period where everyone questioned that faith. Institution after institution came right up to the edge of collapse -- and some plunged off: Bear Stearns, IndyMac, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG (AIG, Fortune 500), Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual (WAMUQ), Wachovia. The most frequently asked question on Wall Street back then was: Who's next? And in that environment, everything shuts down.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
FORTUNE has been on my list as a contrary indicator for quite some time now, at least for signals for buying and selling gold.
RE: Faith
Let’s put it this way — whether we like it or not, People DO put their greatest faith ( rightly or wrongly ) when it comes to saving their money, in the last bastion of perceived safety in a financial crisis -— GOVERNMENT.
Heck, most conservative people I know who work in New York city own government bonds.
First I've heard that -- do you have a link?
Well, Goldman just settled its fraud charges with the SEC for $550 million yesterday. You think it should have paid more? Tell your Congressman.
There is a difference between punishing malefactors or great wealth and letting the whole economy collapse into anarchy. Punish the malefactors, but let’s skip the anarchy. You wouldn’t like the America that emerges from it - one where the entire Constitution has been scrapped.
Becky Quick is an anchorette on CNBC, aka Bubblevision. Whatever it takes to keep the banks and the stock market up, they’re for it. Their so-called free-market-champion Larry Kudlow was pounding the table for TARP with such gusto that Bernie Sanders laughed in his face during an interview and called him a bona fide socialist.
There was no run on the banks! In fact people were loading up savings and Money Markets. Yes, some companies would have failed as well they should have. Who says those companies could not get funding? People were pulling from investments, not banks. We did not have to do this infusion. Where is this crap coming from? This whole fiasco was manufacture by gov’t! The 2006 dems started this whole mess and now America is going to pay for it. Dems should be put out of power for at least a century!
Thanks, I don’t watch CNN so the info helps.
There’s a difference between the bank failing, wiping out stockholders and bondholders, and grandma’s deposits getting wiped out. That’s what the FDIC is for.
RE: If the consequence of failure is profit, there’s no incentive to change
OK, let’s say we let these irresponsible banks ( e.g. Citibank, Wachovia, Washingtom Mutual, etc.) all fail without bailouts of any kind whatsoever... are you saying that all depositors of these banks should simply lose their money as well and government should simply stand by and let that happen ?
If not, what’s the alternative?
RE: That’s what the FDIC is for.
So, the government still has a role to play then after all !
>> $700 billion TARP plan and ripped off the taxpayer.
Where all that cash be at now, Quicky?
Obama has already scrapped the constitution. TARP led the way. Bush/McCain screwed us over royally in the end!!
Screw the taxpayers. We gotta destroy the constitution to save it!! /sarc
Never vote for RINOS!!
They’ll screw you in the end every time!!
Throw the bums OUT!!
This from people who are substantively connected to the welfare of the Wall Street financial system and its hangers-on. This whole debacle which has shackled our progeny to financial servitude would have been averted if these money-makers were allowed to reap the fruits of their true labors.
Not saying that Ms. Quick is a pinko. Now that the pinkos run the media we are hearing this “revisionist” crap more and more as the truth struggles to get past the left’s slanted initial reporting.
I won’t quibble with you on the depth of free-market lassiez-faire capitalism we should have in society, but note that the I in FDIC stands for Insurance — banks (i.e. depositors) pay / paid into this fund and traded some small percentage of the interest on their deposits for the peace of mind; theoretically it follows that it should be self-sustaining in the same way the casualty insurance industry is, and therefore not necessarily exclusively a government enterprise.
Bailing out depositors can be done without passing the money through the insitutions, but other than the FDIC, should the taxpayers be insurers of losses to depositors? Stockholders? Investors? Employees? Is there constitutional authority? Should it be an executive or a legislative decision? Or should it continue to be random, as it is now? Does that comport with equal protection?
There was a run on Lehman, which brought it down. Have you overlooked that one?
You remark is also illogical: the whole point is that the runs that begin are almost impossible to stop. You are arguing, in essence, that medicine has not proved necessary because the patient has not died.
Hear hear. We are being intellectually honest to include Bush / Paulson / Greenspan when we write the list of those who wrecked the economy. One of the left-wing’s favorite fallacies is that conservatives became outraged over defecits only after Obama became President. But we all know there were plenty of threads and plenty of posts of outrage here re TARP long before the November 2008 election.
Yup. Big Government screwed it up. And will continue to scew it up as long as we let them.
Throw out the Big Government liberals and RINOS and their idiot sycophants and enablers!!
Cut the taxes!!
Cut the spending!!
Cut the government!!
Get the government the hell out of the way and set our people FREE!!
Rebellion is brewing!!
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