Seven hundred BILLION dollars. How many of you have wrapped your mind around the fact that this number WAS the total Federal budget just a couple of decades ago?
And now we’re going to use this HUGE amount of taxpayer dollars to bail out – prop up- guarantee- whatever the ‘financial market’.
Do you know that a lot of the problems with the financial markets are the results of government intervention wherein social engineers jimmied the works requiring lenders to violate long-established standards of lending in order to be “fair” to lower income, higher risk segments of the population.
Yes, bunkie, members of congress passed laws to buy votes, and some of those laws pushed lenders to make decisions that they would not have made absent government regulation. Today’s news is the result of that vote-buying effort.
That is not to say that financial folks aren’t entirely capable of greed on their own, but they were going though much of this behind the silly walls erected by legislators who made decisions on what it took to get re-elected, and the money folks cobbled together a paper world wherein large amounts of money were generated based on exchange of risky paper.
Think of buying and selling stuff based on the values you and your buddies assigned to the “stuff”. These folks were buying and selling the financial market equivalent of beanie babies! Each time a block of crap was sold, it increased value, at least in the eyes of the holder and the seller, just like beanie babies and baseball cards. The item being sold was of no intrinsic value except to some nebulous, mythical segment of the population and sooner or later they were going to get called for it.
You say you have a beanie baby worth $3000? Why? Because you paid $2500 and it appreciated. And the beanie baby guru you saw at the big flea market SAID your beanie baby was rare and valuable? As long as you dwell in the insular world of beanie babies, you’re fine, and I’m happy for you. But one day, the car note and the house note comes due, and you walk into my office and try to pay me by giving me your $3000 beanie baby and I shake my head and want cash. And your beanie baby market comes crashing down because you can’t get real value for perceived value.
That’s what happened to the financial market. MBA’s and PhD’s have built a world of beanie baby paper money, and somebody is wanting REAL money instead of a big stack of financial beanie babies.
And **I** shouldn’t be paying for it.
It is just so screwed up- and the average American doesn’t understand it. Very aggrivating
Good Beanie Baby anology- I never did understand the attractions to those things in the first place
….what I don’t underdstand is why, after lying to us for so long about this, why are Barney Franks, Chris
Dodd and Nancy Pelosi not in SERIOUS trouble – oh yeah, I forgot, Congress and the Senate can do anything they want and we just have to suck it up. I think the whole bunch needs to be voted out at the earliest possible opportunity.
I would like to recommend the following site…
http://www.breitbart.tv/
I’m thinking that all of the Senate and Congress should be required to donate all their pay to a fund to correct their mistakes until paid off.
They are totally responsible for this whole debacle and should be held accountable, not Joe Taxpayer. Of course, Joe Taxpayer wasn’t paying attention when he voted these irresponsible, self-serving criminals into office.
Here’s hoping that they don’t pass any ‘rescue’ plan, and just let the chips fall where they may.
As Davey Crockett said as a senator: “It’s not ours to give.” How dare those crooks take from the money that feeds, clothes, and shelters my wife and kids and give it to someone else that didn’t work for it. F them all. It’s time to start the Pitchforks and Tar Party.
And where did I read today that, in the absence of any other accounting, the 700,000,000,000 number was essentially drawn from thin air? No backing data, nothing, just a nice round number. “Thanks for asking, we’ll get back to you. Next question…?”