Free Republic

Call the Capitol now!! Let's do the same thing we did with scamnesty. Let's take down the phone system! HELL NO TO THE BAILOUT!!! LET'S GET OUR AMERICA BACK!! SUPPORT THE TRUE REPUBLICANS WHO ARE THERE FIGHTING FOR US!!!

Ya got PANIC! Right here in Freeper City! With a capital P And that rhymes with B And that stands for BAIL!Well, anyone who wasted six hours yesterday on all the FR bailout threads saw them. The messages calling for a BLACK FRIDAY if Congress didn't JUMP when Henry and Ben whispered "Frog!"Let's see how the Chicken Littles did, OK? The DOW - Falls of from 500 to 900 points were described as "very likely" if we didn't LOCK IN A BAILOUT TODAY.Reality?According to preliminary calculations, the Dow rose 121.07, or 1.10 percent, to 11,143.13. OIL - Meltdown claims included...

To the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate: As economists, we want to express to Congress our great concern for the plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson to deal with the financial crisis. We are well aware of the difficulty of the current financial situation and we agree with the need for bold action to ensure that the financial system continues to function. We see three fatal pitfalls in the currently proposed plan: 1) Its fairness. The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers’ expense. Investors who took risks to earn...

Start with McCain's five point modification of the Paulson plan: (1) oversight, (2) taxpayer equity,(3) full disclosure of all transactions, (post them all in detail, online) (4) executive pay caps, (controversial here on FR, but anyone who wants to keep his golden parachute needs to sink or swim on his own.) (5) no pork.Add to those:(6) no purchases at greater than 50% of face value, ever. (7) no bailout funds for foreign institutions (let their own taxpayers handle that tab), and (8) no bailout of funds backed by "no collateral" loans (credit cards, student loans, etc)And with that in mind,...

Why We're Floundering And a better way forward. by Lawrence B. Lindsey 09/24/2008 7:45:00 PM LAST THURSDAY NIGHT Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke stood surrounded by the bipartisan leadership of Congress to announce that a consensus had emerged that drastic action was needed to save our financial system. On Saturday the first vague details of that action began to emerge. By the time of the first hearings on Tuesday a groundswell of popular opposition produced some of the most broad-based skeptical questioning of the nation's economic leadership that I can remember. What happened? First, it is...

The conventional wisdom is settling in: It's awful, and terribly un-conservative, to nationalize a big lump of the financial industry, but the alternative is too awful to contemplate. Baloney. It may be politically too awful to contemplate, i.e. hazardous to the well-being of our political class, but that's the kind of short-termism that got us here. Once this thing is done, it's done, and the dollar is a few inches closer to being a Soviet rouble. The conviction that government will always bail out a financial catastrophe will be factored into all future trading and financing decisions. Down the road...

Former Reagan diplomat Alan Keyes commented Sept. 23 on the federal government's bailout of mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The former Assistant Secretary of State, currently running for president as an independent, said the bailout plan as proposed by the Bush administration would effectively transform our nation into "a socialist society." The following is the text of Keyes' statement: What I have to say about the bailout is that, with a concrete proposal on the table, it becomes much more obvious what is actually going on right now, and I think that we have to confront it. And...

Senators Isakson/Chambliss, I am writing to express my hope that you will oppose ANY federal bailout of wall street, including government purchase of private mortgage loans and asset backed securities. The implementation of this plan would result in the immediate insolvency of numerous banks and financial institutions across the country as the marking to market of these assets would create a massive hole in the capital base of these banks. Under the alternative of not bailing out these institutions, many will still fold. However, allowing them to fold on their own will allow PRIVATE industry to come in and buy...

....there's one piece of the mortgage-meltdown tale that virtually every article or television program dances around without ever quite confronting. It's the story of the liar's loan. At the height of the mortgage boom .the liar's loan became a routine way of doing business;.in 2006 in some parts of the country, these loans made up as much as half of new mortgages Imagine a city center where running red lights isn't something occasional .... but where everybody does it all the time. That's a lot like the mortgage market one or two years ago. Of all the problems in mortgage...