You’d better check your facts. The only responsible party in all of this for the past 8 years has been the Bush administration. The administration has begged and pleaded with Congress to do something about the problem. Bush warned of a potential financial disaster in his budgets, in speeches to Congress, and in one-on-one sessions with Congressional leaders. He sent his treasury secretaries to Congress repeatedly to plead with them to reform the Fannie/Freddie/Subprime problems.
As Chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan also warned Congress of the fire they were playing with by continuing to expand the availability of shaky mortgages.
If you want cluelessness, you might want to listen to what Barney Frank and Chris Dodd have said all along: There’s no crisis. Fannie and Freddie are sound. There’s nothing to worry about. They were still saying this last year, after the potential problems were clear to everyone but them.
If you want cluelessness, you might look at Hillary Clinton’s plan to loosen the regulations on Fannie and Freddie even more, to provide more ‘real estate liquidity’. This was part of her economic recovery plan on the campaign trail.
If you want cluelessness, you might look at Barack Obama’s plan to remove $500 million dollars a year from the liquid assets of Fannie and Freddie, and use it to build low income housing across the U.S.
Democrats saw Fannie and Freddie as a bottomless pool of social engineering money. It was the Bush administration that was acting as the adult here, trying to push Congress into stopping the madness.
That’s why it was particularly galling to hear Pelosi attempt to blame this on Bush.
But Wow. I gotta say, I agree with him. Harry Reid, in particular, was first critizing him for not being involved, then critizing him for being involved, then critizing him for not getting anything done. Here’s a youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3f0BwyZKMw
The Democrat leadership stunk up DC with this whole mess.
Hopefully, there will not be major downsizing by corporations eagar to cut their losses and hire cheap overseas labor during the next few weeks while we wait. Cause I really don’t want to be unemployed.
So you have no proposals, no ideas, and no insight, other than something better may come along. You do have a list of economists that opposed the Paulson plan, which has been changed considerably in the last week.
There are two possiblities, both of which can be rationalized. Sadly, we will probably never know what the reality was.
Leadership on both sides knew it would never pass. The bill went to the floor so vulnerable congresspeople could make some hay back home about following their constituents and maybe keep their jobs. To the rest of the unwashed, it at least looks like congress is trying to make an effort to do something bipartisan and for the good of the country. Everyone gets to point a finger, but the net change is pretty much zero.
Republicans honestly fled the agreement that leadership of both sides endorsed. This strikes me as highly unlikely. Even if the conservative core was banking on McCain supporting them during his interference at the end of last week, what did they really think they were going achieve? An alternative proposal was never going to be taken seriously.
So at the end of the day, congresspeople get to defend vulnerable seats, the legislature has the appearance of doing something, and some folks who needed it got the opportunity to spit in Bush’s eye. And Pelosi got some airtime to vituperate against Bush. Everyone ends up happy.
The people criticizing the Republicans for torpedoing this deal seem to be looking for some underlying conspiracy or nefarious political machination to explain it, but they aren’t going to find it. I’m not surprised that everyone is shocked that Congress would stand up and refuse to automatically swallow what the administration is feeding them because they haven’t been doing it for the last 8 years. Congressional Republicans have finally rediscovered some gasp concervative fiscal principles.
The American people, at large, haven’t had time to absorb this yet. Right now, they are justifiably hopping mad at the very idea of bailing out the fat cats. They need time to get their heads around the idea that this sucks, any way you slice it, but if nothing is done, this will suck like a black hole on steroids.
Until, Goddess Willing, we can build a better economic system, we absolutely must have a credit system. I don’t like our system, and have spent the best part of my adult life railing against it. But its all we got, goddammit! Shit, how I hate spending good money to put an unjust system on life support! I hate bailing out people who don’t deserve it!
But as much as I admire the artistic acheivement of The Grapes of Wrath, I don’t want to live it.
Were it up to me, I’d duck behind a tree to puke my guts out, and vote for it!
Dow down 777 points (7%)
NASDAQ down 200 points (9%)
S&P 500 down 106 points (8.8%)
That ain’t going to fly with the folks back home, or with their big money backers. Something gets done tomorrow. Let’s just hope that the Chinese don’t decide to bail on us in the meantime.
Yeah, I hope not because you know it is the governments job to make sure all corporations last forever.
The company I depend on very likely lost 800 million thanks to Lehman and AIG. So I do understand the fear, but fear is what got us into other troubles. I think it’s best to breathe, get a grasp of the problem and calmly attempt to fix it.
Nah. Next the value investors swoop in, get some bargains, and we’re back to equilibrium. I’m not thrilled that my portfolio got poleaxed today, but it’s been a rough few weeks.
Lots of disasters could happen, but my entire point is that they WON’T re-fight the last war. The Depression was the catastrophe it was because the government did things they would never do today, such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff; I’m sorry to keep picking on a Ferris Bueller joke, but it was arguably the worst peice of legislation ever passed by a democratically elected legislature.
Obviously, something ELSE horrible could happen, but it’s not going to be what happened in 1929. So at least some things that we know to be disasters will not take place.
No, that certainly isn’t governments job. Its the corporations job to survive - which is why we are looking over layoff plans at my employer right now. When we do rehire - it won’t be in the U.S. - we’ve made that perfectly clear.
If you look at the final vote tally you’ll see that the Democrats cast 235 votes to the Repulbicans’ 198. So the Democrats cast 54% of the total vote.
Yet the Democrats cast 68% of the aye votes for a bill proposed by a Republican administration, urged by a Republican president and fought for by the Republican presidential nominee.
Anyone saying the Dems were responsible for the bill’s defeat neds to take a closer look at reality.
