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« Against Bailout Before He Was For it: Why Does Gingrich Still Weigh in? | Main | Still More FDA Shenanigans »

October 02, 2008

Comments

rawdawgbuffalo

I say Ignorance and freedom is incompatible let wall street take it on the chin I would have too, wouldn’t u?

http://rawdawgb.blogspot.com/2008/03/ignorance-and-freedom-are-incompatible.html

http://rawdawgb.blogspot.com/2008/10/take-it-on-chin.html

Danny

Hi Deb,

I agree with you completely. This bailout deal full of pork should never be passed and I am just amazed that Obama and McCain are willing to sign on and vote yes on such a horrible package for Americans.

Adam

The Paulson/Dodd/Frank plan is severely flawed, but it does give some equity stake and would end up costing a lot less than $700B. It would cost too much, for sure, but not $700B. I pretty much agree with this:
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=how_much_will_it_cost_and_will_it_come_soon_enough

I'm a big fan of the George Soros plan:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/d68e10cc-8f45-11dd-946c-0000779fd18c,dwp_uuid=73adc504-2ffa-11da-ba9f-00000e2511c8,print=yes.html

The other good idea I've heard is to simply issue capital loans to banks to shore up credit, and/or force any participating lenders to suspend dividend payments until they are out of trouble.

Deb Cupples (Buck Naked Politics)

Rawdawg,

Unfortunately, it seems that if we let them take their lumps, we ordinary folks will suffer too.

Deb Cupples (Buck Naked Politics)

Danny,

A LOT of Senators joined forces to support the bailout. I suspect that it's sort of like the war: if they all stand in a cowering group and support it, there's a smaller chance that they'll be singled out and voted out.

I could be wrong, of course.

Deb Cupples (Buck Naked Politics)

Adam,

Thanks for the Prospect link. I looked at AP/Yahoo and a couple other articles (Politico and one or two others).

Unfortunately, none of the articles I read gave details: they just iterated the sound bites about $700 billion and buying toxic assets.

I was frustrated by the media's lack of explanation of the new plan -- while taking a cheer-leading stance.

Mark in SF

"To bail out or not to bail out is not the question. We taxpayers will likely pay serious cash to prevent economic disaster. The real question is: how should we execute a bailout?"

Yes. This is spot on. The public is buying into the false choice first presented by Paulson, accepted by congress, and blindly accepted by the main stream press and the public.

The financially savvy should read Soros on this:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/d68e10cc-8f45-11dd-946c-0000779fd18c,dwp_uuid=73adc504-2ffa-11da-ba9f-00000e2511c8,print=yes.html

A simpler, similar plan was described in the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/business/worldbusiness/23krona.html

Deb Cupples (Buck Naked Politics)

Adam,

I just read the Prospect piece. I agree that the actual costs would not be $700 billion even if all of that money were released at once.

That figure is a form of shorthand.

Though not a full $700 billion, I agree with you that the costs would likely be too high -- especially if Congress doesn't outright limit executive pay for firms' taking tax dollars.

One thing that bothers me about the article: the author seems to assume that it would be a GOOD thing for housing prices to re-inflate.

I submit that the housing bubble hasn't fully deflated yet in all areas of our nation. Thus, I think that prices should still come down further.

Looking at this in a simplified way, how would we taxpayers make money off the "toxic assets" if we paid more for the mortgages/securities than the houses (collateral) are worth?

It seems to me that the only way we could make money is to sell off the collateral.

If housing prices were to come down still further (as I think they should for the long-term health of our nation), we taxpayers would get less of a return on our investment in toxic CDOs.

If housing prices were to go up again, we'd still likely get less of a return, because most people would be unable to afford to take the collateral (houses) off our government's hands.

In know: everyone's speculating. Eventually, we'll see how it actually plays out.

Adam

"Looking at this in a simplified way, how would we taxpayers make money off the "toxic assets" if we paid more for the mortgages/securities than the houses (collateral) are worth?"

Exactly. The real issue is that nobody actually knows how much they are worth. So we may lose only a small amount off the purchase price, or we may lose most of it. We just don't know. Getting a small equity stake as colateral helps cushion the risk, which was one of the main improvements Dodd and Frank made to the original plan. But there's still too much financial risk to the taxpayer in my opinion.

This is why the Soros plan is so good - just force participating banks to issue new stock, and buy it at market prices. This gives the banks the cash they need to start lending again, which solves the pressing problem of the moment. And it's a much, much safer investment of taxpayer dollars.

Once we've taken care of the current credit crunch, we can probably sit back and take a few months (until, say, January 20th or so) to deal with the underlying mortgage and financial regulation problems.

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