Posted on 10/04/2008 7:32:29 PM PDT by Dawnsblood
I heard the opposite on CNBC. They said the $700B figure represented about 5% (IIRC) of the outstanding mortgages held by banks, and that 5% was chosen because that was the percentage of mortgages Treasury thought would never be paid back through re-sale of the paper in the future.
With the fight on a global level for dominance..the will of the American people has taken a back seat to widespread corruption in both parties in the race to be the deciding global force. With this in mind...the American people have every right to question the basic premise that our current crop of elected officials have our best interest or the Country's at heart.
Are they waking up that their OWN ELITES are telling them lies about their OWN COUNTRY and continent too?!? We are fortunate to have a healthy conservative movement, but in UK its as if they have a RINO party a Socialist party and a Leftwing party.
Man, how you got out of that “fawning support of Washington elitism,” I’ll never know.
That’s funny.
P.S. Even decisions founded on morality still need to be informed by knowledge of the facts, here the intricacies of global financial markets.
When will all this "great knowledge" of our global economic plans come to the forefront? After the select few make their beds?..or is there some special decoder ring that one has to wear to become privy to such genius?
No..there is an enormous amount of deception going on to benefit a select few. Ron Paul and Lou Dobbs only have it half right. Both parties have a new common love and unfortunately it is not US.
You are still missing the nuances I am making, or attempting to.
Of course, there is never agreement even at the expert level. However, that does nothing to prove your apparent point that, at some level in evaluating such crisis, we have no choice but to rely on experts. I also found Cavuto’s views, for example, compelling. However, even he never went so far as to say there was no way we needed some sort of government intervention in the credit market.
But back to your post: you yourself demonstrate that you had to rely on experts who had knowledge of and access to the inside baseball on the credit markets. And you relied on some more than others-—as did we all.
I am addressing two separate issues here: (1) whether some sort of government intervention was needed? and (2) if so, what type of intervention?
You are conflating those two. I think it’s very difficult for the average person to become knowledgeable enough in a short period of time to state with any authority whether or not there is a global financial crisis coming!
I think it’s completely possible for the average person to have a well-informed view of when and how government intervention should or should not be pursued.
Finally, clearly those two lines of analysis overlap, because the latter inevitably becomes intertwined with the former. That is, in the end, the facts matter. Since we don’t “do” global financial markets, we had to rely on experts, and rightly, not just one-—but a whole bunch of them to get some sense of what the facts were.
That is all.
Why do you need to know all of these details? First, you must understand that without the government's actions, the collapse of AIG could have caused every major bank in the world to fail.
It is not "elitist" to recognize and accept that if you aren't a plumber, there are some plumbing crisis in which you'd better call in and rely upon the professionals as to what the problem is. You still have input into how the job is done.
Did you or I, for example, know all about, understand, have experience with and have the expertise and knowledge to evaluate the impact on the economy of credit default swaps? Do we now?
If not, where we would get off proclaiming that there is no global financial crisis coming?
How AIG's Collapse Began a Global Run on the Banks
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2097802/posts
FMCDH(BITS)
And Pelosi, Reid, Franks and Dodd and all the others pushing banks to make risky loans will be back in Washington for the next congress.
Precisely the language used in 1929 and for many years after.
As a result, of not doing anything, or doing the wrong things later by FDR, our financial markets did not recover fully until 1954. If it had not been for WWII, we likely would never have recovered domestically. It was the Federal spending for the GI bill that eventually caused the reversal of the decline.
What you see today, is a similar chaotic contraction, and if we learned anything from 1929 forward, we learned that the Fed is doctor that can treat the disease, making the dire medical disease into more of a bad cold where the symptoms are treatable over time.
The fed interference now is a result of past history that deems it necessary, and not a decisive shift to more socialism by government.
However, I do detect a decisive shift in public populist notions spurred largely by the media who is in many cases disseminating distorted or incomplete information in this a election year.
Although both political sides almost appear to be in agreement as far as the voter is concerned, they have entirely different motives for doing so.
This is the danger that Ben Franklin and other Founders spoke about during our formation and they made us a Republic in order to avoid democracy pitfalls they called public whimsy.
This, and the "useful idiot" commentary by the true socialist Founders upon dissecting democracies, led to the comments that I made on this thread, and the fears that I have for the future of this nation.
Pick your side wisely unless you prefer to be a "useful idiot".
The problem with the ‘hired to do a job’ analogy is when your brain surgeon starts working on your car. Nowhere in the Constitution is there authority for this bailout of private interests. Nor was there authority for forcing private banks to give loans that could not be paid back.
Your observations go to the “how” of a bailout, which is something I have said many times is a legitimate and necessary evaluation we have to make.
I am reacting to people who feel that at the precise moment of alleged crisis think it is possible for the masses to swoop in, switch off “The Simpsons” and get up to speed on mortgage-backed securities derivatives, the central banking functions, etc., and then to declare that “we don’t NEED a bailout.”
So, back to the analogy we are discussing, I am focused on when the brain surgeon, and a whole bunch of other brains surgeons, say, “You need brain surgery immediately.” I don’t know how helpful it would be to have millions of people who know nothing about the situation except what they have picked up in the MSM to be opining about whether or not the person NEEDS brain surgery.
If the brain surgeons are proposing some approach to surgery that can be evaluated against their area of expertise-—for example, they claim they can do brain surgery by changing the muffler on your car-—of course, that’s a problem!
It doesn't take a brain surgeon to know that giving a trillion dollars to Hank Paulson without accountability is a silly idea. And much of that is likely to go to a new man next January, and we have no idea who that new man is.
The Constitution has a checks and balances approach. There is nothing Constitutional in the bailout, and it's obvious to all.
I’ll give you that there’s some merit to your argument, but not enough for me to totally discount what the experts are saying.
It's a free country, you get to pick your experts, and I'll pick mine, i.e. "150 economists have signed a petition saying the bailout was not the right thing to do."ing
I think it's my experts who are suggesting that trying to keep the prices at the bubble level, like they did from 1929 on, just makes things worse. They poured milk out in the 30s to keep milk prices up. We may have to burn or bulldoze houses to keep the housing prices up this time around. Of course, just letting them stay empty for a couple of weeks has the same effect in some cities.
No one that I’ve heard, NO ONE, but especially not Paulson, has suggested trying to keep bubble prices.
Quite the opposite.
Paulson has clearly stated that many more banks and corporations WILL fail and WILL be “allowed” to fail; that the purpose of intervention at this point was to facilitate a “more orderly” sell-off of both toxic paper and other *overvalued* assets.
What we are experiencing is one of the mothers of all corrections. Greenspan had a lot to do with this by doing what you complain of now: propping up prices with cheap money. But Paulson and Bernanke are not on that path.
They are trying to stabilize the economy within certain broad parameters while letting it ruthlessly do its thing within those parameters.
The last thing anyone is trying to do is prop up home prices. They are, however, trying to give homeowners some of the benefit of the forgiveness of loans so that so measure of liquidity can return to the real estate market. That is in no way propping up prices, but rather letting them settle to market levels while recognizing that that process causes gridlock in this environment.
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