Posts Tagged ‘bailout’

Financial Disaster Coming?

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

Read this. Send it to all your friends. Send it to your enemies and even strangers. This is the absolute truth about the Congress. No bull.

Steve Schippert posts at Wizbang:

We are witnessing a failure in government. Our Congress cannot work together to provide an immediate fix to a problem it created in the first place: forcing the American financial sector to extend mortgages to those who were high risk borrowers in order to champion to the American people that more minorities own homes than ever. That worked well under a booming economy. But when the natural cycle of economics turned downward, fear dismissed became reality unavoidable. The house of cards came tumbling down.

And even still, amid all the haggling and fighting going on in Congress over how to shore up the financial cash crisis, not a word is mentioned about changing the counter-intuitive practices forced upon mortgage lenders in the first place. In this respect, it’s not unlike how Congress and the White House chose to address illegal immigration: by trying to deal with those already here first rather than initially addressing the cause: the influx of illegals that continues to flow unabated.

Make no mistake, if we wake to Black Monday this week, the responsibility lies squarely upon Congress and the electorate which has put them there, not our banks. Our banks’ hands were forced by mandates from Washington, not their boardrooms.

And here we are. With a Congress so polarized that they are incapable of working together.

We elected them. We pay their salaries. If they mess this up, each and every one ought to be voted out of office in November. Complete turnover. Fire their asses. You and I both know that if we were even half this bad at our own jobs, we would have lost them a long time ago.

Fire Congress!

Bailout Blues

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Here are some important points that need to be addressed with this financial bailout.

  1. If the Federal government buys these bad mortgages, does that mean the Feds now own hundreds of thousands of homes? What about local property taxes? What about maintenance and upkeep? Will the Feds evict residents?
  2. There is, in fact, a market for these securities. The price is very, very low, five or ten cents on the dollar. What will the federal government pay? If much more than market, does this not reward the mortgage holders for not making a market?
  3. Is there any legal basis to limit salaries and bonuses paid to corporate bigshots?
  4. How is this solution different than the one used by the Communist Chinese to hide their bad debts off the banking books?
  5. Why should we trust the Federal Government to do the right thing?