Posted on 09/19/2008 7:59:40 PM PDT by hatfieldmccoy
Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson just wrapped up his press conference announcing the Mother of All Bailouts. He said a “bold” approach was needed to achieve “stability” in the market.
Let me translate that.
“Bold” = Massively massive, taxpayer-funded rescue.
“Stability” = Privatizing profits and socializing losses on a scale we have never seen before in our lifetimes.
I have had it with Pollyanna conservatives who continue to parrot the “fundamentals of the market are great!” line.
The fundamentals of the market suck. The fundamentals of capitalism have been sabotaged.
(Excerpt) Read more at michellemalkin.com ...
I'm with you I guess. There are times when it is good to be on the back nine of life.
This presentation is a little crude. But it makes the point about the RTC that is being set up.
http://subprimeshowtime.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/resolution-trust-the-mother-of-all-scams/
I am worried about this issue... I could see it going one of two ways- 1. as mentioned above it is the death of fiscal conservatism, or 2. once the American people wake up and realize how much of this can be blamed on the politicians themselves and lobbyists then they will trust government less and want to cut back on funds...
ultimately, I think it won’t make much of a difference either way...
There's little doubt that this week we were watching the modern equivalent of a 1930s bank run. Instead of lining up at bank windows, investors were unloading financial assets on their PCs. Credit markets had seized up, to the point that even routine daily settlements had stopped until banks had the actual securities or cash in hand.
With the government already deeply implicated in financial markets -- and a substantial cause of the mistakes leading to the panic -- Treasury and the Federal Reserve had to act to prevent a crash. Libertarians will cry no-havoc, and the left will hail the (false) dawn of a new socialist era, but a financial meltdown would have been far worse for the economy and the cause of capitalism.
I'm one of you too. Lots of water under the bridge.
I am sorry our generation has let you down. I am 39 and appalled by the ignorance of my generation and those behind me.
From what I`ve taken in so far is that everything was seizing up. Banks were afraid to lend to banks and the entire system was just going to stop.
Now, Rupert Murdoch was on Cavuto and explained it like this,
the Feds now basically own these companies and their holdings will be auctioned off back to the private sector.The Feds won`t be losing much if anything and have averted a total seize up of the entire banking industry.
This country faces severe DEFLATIONARY pressures. For example we have a worker productivity improvement index that's in the category of what is considered a high GDP growth figure. We also are providing housing for our hundreds of millions of people at about 60% of last year's cost, and at a fraction of what comparable housing would cost elsewhere in the world.
The fact that the dollar declined relative to the Euro does not mean the dollar is withering away ~ rather, the EU central bankers have been fighting the oil price increase as if it were merely inflation. They, BTW, do not have a high worker productivity improvement index, nor has the price of housing been reduced to any great extent in most of Europe for the last 3 or 4 centuries.
The financial system was geared to moderate growth, expansion in international trade, stable energy supplies, and ever rising housing costs.
Obviously it's got to be readjusted to accommodate higher worker productivity rates and declining housing costs.
Reverting to monitarist theories to deal with the present situation is a known route to total economic meltdown. Ask Herbert Hoover. He got the Great Depression started. Ask Franklin Roosevelt. He made sure the Great Depression lasted 10 years longer than it should have.
Next, what happens as roboticization makes America everybody's lowest cost producer for the entire world.
For those interested (you two or three out there who follow my stuff) Dick Morris has taken several of my more lengthy essays on FR and stuffed them into his latest book ~ just as if he'd written them. You read my stuff, you get Dick Morris' book material for free!
That we will never know will we, so it is just so much made up boogie man.
really oportune however...middle of an intense campaign....no critics on either side...
That, BTW, is the American way. We don't take those companies that go belly up and put the workers and managers into work camps while sending the machinery (and computers) to the iron monger's cauldrons.
Who was shorting !? Still don`t know who shorted AA on 9/11.
Good to to halt all shorting. That and derivatives, they should seriously think of outlawing.
EVERYONE: Freep the Gretawire.com poll asking whether Todd Palin should honor the Witch-hunt subpoena against him! (HINT: “NO”)
“The Feds won`t be losing much if anything and have averted a total seize up of the entire banking industry.”
Darn right they won’t. The taxpayer will. Don’t believe the crap about this not costing anything in the end. There will be over 1 trillion in losses from all of this. If any of this stuff was really worth anything then the taxpayer would not have to be the ones to buy it. That last RTC the government set up for the savings and loan Crisis cost the tax payer 120 billion. And that was a very small crisis compared to this. But the bankers will stay rich and that is all that matters. This pyramid scheme consists of so many aspects besides subprime. The Credit default swaps which is insurance they wrote to one another on all this fraudulent lending amounts to many trillions of dollars. You see the bankers don’t have the money to pay the CDS. Just remember that the government enabled and even encouraged this whole mess(Like the repeal of depression era legislation that protected us from it). But it is the bankers who came up with this whole scam. If not for there free run in our country then all would be rosy in the US right now. Out founders warned outright about the corruption of bankers and how they could destroy our nation. It turned out to be true.
I personally think that deflation wouldn’t be so bad if we did not have minimum wage laws.
There is real good argument about this never being caused by the shorts. In fact some knowledgeable people say that if we crash then we will crash a lot harder now. I just look at a stock like “GE” who may be added to the “No Short” list. But they were not on that list today and could be shorted. This is what happened to GE stock today with shorts in play.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GE
Uh, no.
Allowing a financial meltdown to suck the economy into an unstoppable deflationary spiral like in ‘29 is not fiscal conservatism. This problem was brought about by decades of monetary neglect, fiscal irresponsibility and welfare-state economic mismanagement, and the bill just happened to come due this month.
Herbert Hoover didn’t start the great depression, the Federal Reserve did. Ben Bernanke has written extensively on this, the great depression started because the Fed was manipulating the money supply.
The Fed is manipulating the money supply now but instead of trying to reduce the dollars in circulation they are printing them like madmen. Net result. The Fed is responsible— along with the globalist agenda to redistribute American wealth which prompted the Fed to print money like madmen.
You talk about the economy being ‘geared’ for certain things... this the soviet socialist idea that men can have ‘perfect knowledge’ and therefor run a system and control the ups and downs. Well you see where this hubris has gotten us, corporate communism, apparently. The Fed needs to be disbanded and the people responsible put on trial for turning a republic into a socialist nightmare, among other things.
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