It is delusional if anyone expects me to believe this is a democratic or republican caused problem - are we really out of our mind ? Another example of politics rearing its ugly head.
The blame gets placed squarely on the greedy American citizine- no place else. You want to call it the persuit of the American dream- are you kidding me ? Republicans always cite accepting personal responsability- well now is a good time to come face to face with that lack of responsability our fellow man has been induging in-
Quit blaming it on Clinton or any one else but " We the people "
Like we said, somebody....there is enough blame to go around. My only question is....they (the government) says they are getting advise from 'the experts'. What experts and haven't we had so called experts BEFORE this mess?
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
We the people can't get a loan unless the financial institutions will give it to us. It's true that there are too many people who want everything now and don't have the money for it so if you're talking about them then it's true, but the banks still have to accept some of the blame for lending them the money.
Somebody, the reason that people say it's the Republicans fault is because they are uninformed and listen to the politicians instead of researching the facts for themselves. The whole mess started when Bill Clinton was president when the lending rules were changed so that everyone could enjoy the American dream of owning a house. Some of us one this site are old enough to remember when it happened. The lending institutions got even more creative and started giving loans to people who should have never got a loan and the wonderful government didn't bother checking on anything that was going on in the financial community because they needed money from them for their campaigns. There's enough blame to go around for both parties and both Presidents.
In 2004 Bush introduced the American Ownership Society, the purpose of which was to give low income families the opportunity to own a home. And they took that opportunity and defaulted on hundreds of thousands of loans. That us the taxpayer is being asked to payback.
Hasn't anybody realized that all our politicians are unethical, immoral, greedy bums?? Democrat or Republican. They play us like puppets, we act is if we are rooting for our favorite baseball team. Rooting for our guy, while rooting against the other guy, just because it seems like the thing to do. Even though deep down inside, we know they're all just empty suits/skirts and we hate both parties.
McCain-suck.
Obama -sucks.
I just wish Americans wouldn't get caught up in the media/pundit circus. While the media and political party paid pundits get Americans all fired up over things like Palin's pregnant daughter, McCain doesn't know how to e-mail, Obama's pastor's racist, Palin's husband had a DWI, McCain has 7 houses.
While the media is filling the empty heads of the American sheeple with this useless mind candy, the power brokers in Washington are preparing to fleece the American people of $700,000,000,000.
Go ahead, keep on playing the blame game....... 'it was Bush's fault',,,,,'no, it was Clintons fault',,,,,'NO Bush',,,,,,'NO Clinton'.
I challenge anybody reading this board to name people they know personally that will directly benefit from the $700 billion dollar bailout.
If you would read some of the above posts you'll see that there were a number of politicians both Dem and Rep and Obama was one of them who recieved large contributions from both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for their campaigns and as you know politicians aren't going to do anything to upset the cash flow so I take some issue with your assumption that it's all the citizens fault.
Why are taxpayers the ones to get fleeced? Froma Harrop
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the Wall Street executives you see hanging their heads have been called many things, chief among them “greedy.” But in deciding their guilt, you must consider mitigating circumstances. Compare these two sets of circumstances. A robber goes into a convenience store, sticks a gun in the manager’s face and demands the contents of the register. The robber has committed a vicious crime. He deserves the harshest sentence. But suppose the convenience store owner had left the cash register open and gone out for a smoke. The bad guy walks in, sees the bills hanging out, helps himself and then leaves. Is he breaking the law? Yes. But is this the terrible crime of armed robbery? No. The careless store manager was in some way a party to this crime. And so are you, the voters of America. You did not demand the proper monitoring of the markets and the plunder that inevitably followed. The Bush administration’s $700 billion bailout of bad debt is proof that, all along, the American cash register had been left open. The modern Republican philosophy of deregulation was clearly a sham. According to that ideology, Washington would let the traders and speculators and pushers of risky debt do as they pleased. The markets would punish fools for their mistakes. But as you can see, Washington won’t let the markets fully do their work, because their job right now is to crash. Unfortunately, the world economy would crash with them, thus the Bush administration is transferring the bad debt to the taxpayers. The dictionary defines greed as “an excess desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth.” Do these millionaires and billionaires sitting here in the courtroom fit that description? That’s a value judgment for you to make. But to those of us who still believe in Darwinian science, the defendants were just doing what came naturally. The giraffe with the longer neck can reach the highest leaves. The faster lion gets the meatiest part of the warthog. These creatures, those best able to secure food, are the ones who survive and reproduce. That’s why, over the millennia, the giraffes developed long necks and lions speed — evolution at work. On Wall Street, money is the colorful plumage that attracts others of the species. You put on a magic show convincing the public that you can create gold out of whatever mysterious financial derivative is hiding behind the curtain, and riches follow. Dick Fuld, the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, did not personally make $490 million dollars by carefully investing his stockholders’ money. He made it by having Lehman borrow 35 times its capital, an extraordinary amount of leverage that Washington evidently considered none of its business. How can one consider Fuld a survivor? After all, Lehman Brothers has just gone bankrupt. True, Lehman investors are now carcasses drying out on the Serengeti Plain of finance. But Fuld is doing OK. He had long ago pocketed his half billion by cashing in the stock options and stock he received as Lehman CEO, according to Time magazine. That’s the way it’s done. You get your money upfront, then pass the risks on to others. The chump of last resort is apparently the American taxpayer. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you don’t accuse the coyote of greed when it attacks your chickens. You put a fence around the poultry. It was the law of the jungle on a Wall Street that will never fully pay the consequences. And guess who the chickens are? You. Froma Harrop is a nationally syndicated columnist.
Bailout, urgency challenged Senators unswayed by dire warnings BY JEANNINE AVERSA The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Refusing to be pushed, Republicans and Democrats alike rebuffed dire warnings Tuesday from the government’s top economic officials of recession, layoffs and foreclosed homes if Congress doesn’t quickly approve the administration’s emergency $700 billion financial bailout plan. Congressional leaders still predicted passage — with significant changes — but Wall Street’s nerves were hardly soothed. The Dow Jones industrials sank 161 points and now are off more than 500 this week after initially surging on the bailout announcement last week. Deepening market trouble was just one piece of the economic havoc that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told senators would ensue if Congress lags in acting on the administration’s proposal to rescue tottering financial institutions. “I share the outrage that people have,” Paulson said. “It’s embarrassing to look at this. I think it’s embarrassing to the United States of America. There is a lot of blame to go around.” But without the bailout plan, Paulson and Bernanke sketched out a dire scenario for senators at a contentious daylong hearing: Neither businesses nor consumers would be able to borrow money, and the world’s largest economy would grind to a virtual halt. In public and in private meetings, both Democrats and Republicans said big changes are needed, presaging a difficult road ahead for the measure. The legislation the administration is promoting would allow the government to buy bad mortgages and other rotten assets held by troubled banks and financial institutions. Getting those debts off their books should bolster those companies’ balance sheets, making them more inclined to lend and easing one of the biggest choke points in the credit crisis. If the plan works, it should help lift a major weight off the national economy that is already sputtering. Democrats were determined to wrest concessions from the administration on domestic spending and middle-class economic aid. And they said Republicans had to share in the politically tricky task of pushing through a financial bailout six weeks before the elections at a time when millions of everyday Americans are economically strapped. “It’s their problem. It’s their bill. And they’re going to have to fi gure out if they can support it,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said of Republicans. “Nobody wants to have to do this,” agreed Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader. He said he was hopeful of a quick agreement, despite withering criticism from conservative GOP lawmakers who recoiled at the prospect of federal intervention. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., said, “This massive bailout is not a solution. It is financial socialism and it’s un-American.” Separately, law enforcement officials said the FBI had begun investigating four institutions whose collapse helped trigger the financial crisis. The FBI is looking at potential fraud by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and insurer American International Group Inc., said two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigations. The inquiries, still in preliminary stages, will focus on the financial institutions and the people who ran them, one senior law enforcement official said. As for the bailout plan, both parties’ presidential candidates joined fellow senators in insisting on alterations in the administration’s drastic prescription. Democrats and Republicans alike demanded that the bailout limit pay packages for executives of companies helped by the rescue. “Clipping executive compensation is easy right now — everybody wants it,” said Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga. Democrats also were pushing proposals to let the government take some type of stake in the companies that it helps. The administration has balked at that, fearing it would discourage fi nancial companies from getting the help they need through the bailout, thereby blunting the plan’s effectiveness. Democrats also want to let judges rewrite mortgages to lower bankrupt homeowners’ monthly payments, another demand the administration is resisting. Both Sens. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Banking Committee, and the panel’s top-ranking Republican, Richard Shelby of Alabama, said significant changes are needed before the rescue plan can be passed. “We have got to look at some alternatives,” Shelby said. Getting the action right is key, Dodd said: “There is no second act to this.” He later spoke disparagingly of the administration’s proposal. “What they have sent us is not acceptable,” he told reporters.
Fed plows $30 billion in money markets overseas Wednesday September 24, 1:42 am ET By Jeannine Aversa, AP Economics Writer
Federal Reserve plows $30 billion into money markets overseas to ease credit stresses
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Federal Reserve, in coordinated action with foreign central banks, plowed $30 billion into money markets overseas Wednesday, part of an ongoing effort to fight a global credit crisis. The Fed's action -- taken at 1 a.m. EDT -- sets up temporary "swap" arrangements to supply dollars to the central banks of Australia, Denmark, Norway and Sweden in exchange for their currencies.
"These facilities, like those already in place with other central banks, are designed to improve liquidity conditions in global financial markets," the Fed said in a brief statement.
"Central banks continue to work together during this period of market stress and are prepared to take further steps as the need arises," the Fed added.
The new swap arrangements will provide up to $10 billion each to the central banks of Australia and Sweden and $5 billion apiece to the central banks of Denmark and Norway.
Last week, the Fed and other foreign central banks pumped as much as $180 billion into money markets overseas. The European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of Canada participated in that maneuver.
The global credit crisis poses a danger not only to the U.S. economy but also the world economy.
Finance officials from the world's major economic powers pledged this week to do all they can to provide relief.
The Group of Seven countries said they welcomed the extraordinary steps by the United States to stem the crisis, including a plan for the Treasury Department to buy $700 billion in bad mortgages and other toxic assets held by banks and other financial institutions. Those dodgy debts are at the heart of the crisis. Besides the United States, the Group of Seven is made up of Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada.
Let the top of the pyramid fall.....we can always build a new precipice
Quoted Text
Main Entry: prec·i·pice Pronunciation: \ˈpre-s(ə-)pəs\ Function: noun Etymology: French, from Middle French, from Latin praecipitium, from praecipit-, praeceps headlong, from prae- + caput head — more at head Date: 1613 1: a very steep or overhanging place 2: a hazardous situation ; broadly : brink
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
I guess we have found another part of the monkey on our backs.....and Mr.Buffet knows who they/it is........and so do our elected officials....they talk like they never ever saw it coming.....bullsh#$!!!!!!.....shame shame shame sham sham sham......as for folks being foreclosed on---torch the house...... then go take on class on discernment.......
We the people can't get a loan unless the financial institutions will give it to us. It's true that there are too many people who want everything now and don't have the money for it so if you're talking about them then it's true, but the banks still have to accept some of the blame for lending them the money.
My last car loan was in college ( 1972) A 1969 VW Bug ( 30 + MPG by the way )
A 700 Billion Bailout With No Review or Oversight Whatsoever
Posted: September 24 2008
The unbelievable breakdown in American lending standards, market instruments no more than a worthless pile of paper, note how market elitists are using the market crash to put pressure on Congress, the plan to bail out fraudsters, the vicious circle of printing more and more currency, more wiled speculation to come after a bailout,
As it turns out, all the foreign nations holding dollar-denominated foreign exchange surplus reserves in the form of treasury paper realized that we were going to inflate them into oblivion, what with all the bailouts and such, and it appears, well, that they all ran for the door at once, if you catch my drift. We wore out all the printing presses trying to cash in their bonds for them, and all we had left was a huge pile of treasury paper, which we decided to throw out of my helicopter instead of cash. They're in pretty big denominations, so the people should be quite impressed. In any case, we couldn't print any more Federal Reserve notes on account of the printing press issue, and besides, the notes wouldn't have been good for anything but heating fuel, "furnace fodder" if you will, so why go through all the expense to print more? We have to be fiscally responsible, you know. MM: Yeah, right. Gee, I know this may sound odd, but now that your helicopter's engines have shut down, I could swear that I hear -- could it be -- the sound of marching jackboots, doing a goose-step, in the background?
HP: Ahem, well, after Ben and I consulted with our Gestapo, oh, I mean our Department of Homeland Security, they decided to send in the foreign storm-troopers, er, our soldiers, as a follow-up to our helicopter drop. They were apparently concerned that there might be mass social upheaval, and possibly even a revolution, after the sheople, I mean our citizens, discovered that the treasury bills we just dropped were nothing but "worthless paper." Well, Ben, we better get going. We barely have time to pack and get ready to flee to our bunkers and safe-houses with the rest of our "comrades." Hey, see ya, wouldn't wanta be ya!!! Oh, and by the way: Sich Heil! MM: I have a bad feeling about this!
After over 40 years of financial reporting and analysis, we can say, without hesitation, that the 700 billion bailout plan proposed by Fed Chairman Buck-Busting Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hanky Panky Paulson, on behalf of the Caligula Administration, is the most abusive and piggish fascist scheme we have ever heard proposed. This is the living, freaking, end. We sit hear stunned and stupefied at the sheer arrogance of a corporatist, fascist plan, so saturated with moral hazard, that it can only be described, to use the words of Jean-Pierre Roth, president of the Swiss National Bank, in his description of the breakdown in American lending standards, as "unbelievable!"
First, note how the elitists have allowed the stock markets to crash over the past two days in order to put pressure on Congress to adopt their plan. They have withdrawn PPT support in an effort to stuff this plan down Congress's throat. And this pressure will continue until they get their way. This is what Congress gets for letting the Illuminati run our country. Now, they will have to face their constituents in a no-win situation. If they adopt the plan, they will be accused of bailing out the fraudsters, and of privatizing the profits from the sheople's hard work in evil elitist corporations, while socializing the losses from yet another bankers' Ponzi-scheme in the sheople as is their custom. If they don't adopt the plan, and as a result, the credit markets freeze up and the US economy goes down in flames, they will be blamed for that as well, even though that is our best solution at this point (i.e. purging the system of its excesses). The fact that our Congress has sat on their collective duffs and allowed this financial debacle to happen, when it was quite easily avoidable with even the slightest amount of regulation and oversight, gives you every reason to vote out every one of these reprobates and sociopaths ,which we like to refer to as "incumbent scum." The only exceptions to the coming ouster of incumbents, as far as we are concerned, are Ron Paul, and perhaps Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky. Congress appears to be balking, and rightly so, claiming that they need more time to deliberate over this situation, to ponder potential alternative plans, or at the very least to modify the current proposal to make it more palatable to voters, which is impossible, at least in our humble opinion. But is this just more posturing to make it look like they are not rolling over and playing dead for the elitists, or has Congress finally found their collective backbone? Only time will tell, but based on past experience, we aren't getting our hopes up.
These filthy Bosch Pigs want to give Paulson carte blanche to pay for toxic waste at its "hold-to-maturity" value with taxpayer funds, meaning you will pay par for crap that is worth pennies on the dollar. Then you, the taxpayer, will get paid back in hyper-inflated dollars on ever-deteriorating assets, with flagging real estate prices chipping away at their value without recovery for decades, meaning that your collateral on any of these no-down-payment, give-him-a-loan-if-he's-breathing mortgages will be impaired and next to useless in the event of default. And who is going to administer all these loans, and process the payments, and deal with defaults? And what types of toxic waste will be subject to the bailout? Will we be taking on defaulted credit default swaps, interest rate swaps, credit cards, corporate bonds, commercial paper and aircraft leases also? Will we solve the mortgage-backed securities problem only to be bitten in the butt by credit default and interest rate swaps, or other toxic paper that was equally steeped in fraud? Of course we will.
The most egregious part of the proposed bailout is that it allows Paulson to dole out the funds and deal with the toxic waste without any judicial oversight and with full immunity from any criminal prosecution. This means he can pay par with your hard-earned money, and then when it becomes clear that the cess-pool-paper is only worth a small fraction of par, he can pawn it off to his cronies at bargain basement prices, thus distributing any profits to the elitists as they see fit, and the American people can go spit in the wind.
And how is this elitist bailout bonanza going to benefit the taxpayers, or our economy? It isn't! In fact, it is going to exacerbate an already volatile situation. Thanks to free trade and globalization, the global economy has become a tripwire economy. One wrong move, and the claymores go off, taking out the entire global financial system in a blaze of shrapnel and glory. The whole house of fraudster cards, rife with trade and investment imbalances, then collapses and gets sucked into a gargantuan financial black hole. All it will take is one nation whose citizens are fed up with rampant inflation. They will have to break the dollar pegs, cash in their US treasury bonds, and absorb the excess amounts of their domestic currencies by purchasing them with the dollars received as proceeds from the sale of the treasury bonds. This strengthens their currency, thus moderating their inflationary problems, but then their exports suffer. Meanwhile, the dollar starts to decline, and everyone else is afraid that this decline will continue and threaten the value of their reserves. The mad dash for the front door begins, and not everyone can fit through at the same time. The dollar gets destroyed, along with the US economy, as the cash from dumped treasuries finds its way back to the US through purchases of US assets by the foreign nations that are looking desperately to dump their cash, thus creating hyperinflation on a Weimar scale. That is why the FTC is no longer publishing statistics regarding foreign investment in the US, to hide this problem from the public as the dollars start pouring in. Adding to global woes, the exporting nations, whose goods are now no longer competitively priced, go down with the USS Titanic.
The United States operates at a deficit, spending more money than we gained from our own production, and we need foreigners to finance our profligacy. In order to help us finance this deficit, these foreigners buy our treasury paper with the excess dollars they obtain from their trade with the US. They do this by having their central banks print more of their domestic currency to absorb the dollar forex which is flooding their economies due to trade imbalances with the US. Their central banks simply print more of their own currency, which is then used in currency exchanges to soak up that dollar forex. This process inflates their economies by dumping their own currency on their domestic markets while bidding up dollars which are then used to purchase treasuries. While those dollars are parked in treasuries, they do little harm to US citizens via inflation, although we do have to pay interest on them. The foreign nations then enjoy a competitive price on their exports to the US because of their artificially weakened currency, but at the expense of domestic inflation. This system perpetuates the trade imbalances, and the inflation in the foreign nations. Obviously, this cannot go on forever. And now, all these wild, lunatic bailouts will threaten the entire world economy. Why? Because we are dumping more dollars into the world economy, devaluing our currency, and therefore the value of all these foreign-owned US treasury bonds. Imagine what will happen when 700 billion dollars, in cash, is dumped into the fraudster system. If the fraudsters start lending again, that means the fractional banking multiplier, which usually runs at 7 to 8 times reserves, will then generate five to six trillion dollars of new money and credit, an amount that would swamp the US and global financial systems even if the Fed shut off its money and credit spigot completely. And who would they lend all this money to? The overextended, totally broke, unemployed, underemployed sheople who are being hyper-inflated into oblivion? Of course not. It will be used for more wild speculation, and to produce more leverage, and more fraud, and more toxic waste, which will add yet more money and credit to our already waterlogged, or should we say dollar-logged, system.
And just because there are losses does not mean that this 700 billion will be absorbed by those losses. The money that was used to produce the assets which suffered those losses is still in the system, but not where the elitists wanted it to be parked. They are trying to get that money back, at your expense, through this bailout plan. Where is that money now? It is following a path from wherever the last seller of the toxic waste, before it went bad, spent or invested the proceeds from the sale of that toxic waste. Remember, these derivatives added nothing to the system. They are just a re-bundling of existing debt-type assets, with the proceeds being used to create more debt for more re-bundling, in what is truly a Ponzi-scheme, using the same money over and over again to create more debt. The only new money produced were the fees and commissions paid to do the re-bundling. What about the money that the current owner of the toxic waste has lost on principal and interest on defaulted loans? That money is in the future earnings of the defaulted borrowers, who instead of spending it on principal and interest to cover mortgage payments, will now spend it on rent and other necessities. And what of the lost leverage? That is being replaced by the dollars coming back into the system through de-leveraging, and which will be available for re-leveraging when it comes into stronger hands, as it must, eventually.
Further, our national debt is going to grow by leaps and bounds on account of these bailouts, and this affects our ability to repay, thus weakening the dollar further and exacerbating inflationary pressures. We are like a person who earns twenty thousand dollars a year and has two hundred thousand dollars worth of credit card balances. We have news for you. Those balances are not going to be repaid. The foreign holders of dollar-denominated assets are not stupid, and the dollar suffers in foreign exchange markets every time the debt ceiling gets raised. Our debts are accelerating. They are not leveling off. And these bailouts will put that acceleration into hyper-drive. Once the exit from treasuries begins, there will be no stopping it. The elitists want to jump-start the system so they can run the markets up again to complete The Big Sting Two, but this is a futile effort because everything else is imploding. Few can qualify for loans anymore, because the credit standards are being tightened and they are broke and overextended, and the ones who do qualify do not need it. What will businesses do with loan money when they have no customers left to buy their products? As the economy and the real estate markets continue to tank, the toxic waste will become ever less valuable, and now they want to plant that future misery in the taxpayer gardens. These bailouts must be stopped at all costs, or we are going to get vaporized later.
The system must be purged, and the dollar rescued, although we believe it is probably too late for the latter. But it is sure worth giving it a try, because having the world's reserve currency is very advantageous.
All this craziness reminds us of an old Genesis song, called "Land of Confusion." We note that our generation unknowingly, or ignorantly, helped bring the Illuminati into power, and now the Baby Boomers, who have tasted of their venomous temptations, are going to have to take them out. We know you can do it. You are our largest generation, and you have the most to lose, so you cannot, and must not, fail. All we can do now is teach you where things went wrong. It will be up to you to set things right, if not for yourselves, then for your children and your grandchildren.
HP: Ahem, well, after Ben and I consulted with our Gestapo, oh, I mean our Department of Homeland Security, they decided to send in the foreign storm-troopers, er, our soldiers, as a follow-up to our helicopter drop. They were apparently concerned that there might be mass social upheaval, and possibly even a revolution, after the sheople, I mean our citizens, discovered that the treasury bills we just dropped were nothing but "worthless paper." Well, Ben, we better get going. We barely have time to pack and get ready to flee to our bunkers and safe-houses with the rest of our "comrades." Hey, see ya, wouldn't wanta be ya!!! Oh, and by the way: Sich Heil! MM: I have a bad feeling about this!
This was taken from Cicero's post above. Aren't they stating the same as this:
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
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