Economics and politics make a crappy stew.
I simply can't believe the amount of "wrongness" in this current so-called economic catastrophe. It was wrong for housing prices to go so high, it was wrong for banks to loan such outrageous amounts to people with little or no ability to repay, it was wrong for the construction industry to oversupply the market, it was wrong for those people with loans to default on the loans and it was wrong for Chuck Schumer and the media to start a run on the banks by conflating the circumstances beyond their true scope.
But the wrongest thing of all is for the US government to take the taxpayer's hard earned money and give it to those same bankers and wall street lobbyists. And don't kid yourself, that is exactly what will happen to much if not all of this near trillion dollar "bail-out".
None of the rest of us get bailed out. I could never hope to get a $20,000 check from the government to cover my losses from our June 28th hailstorm. And that wasn't even caused by bad business decision making. I have no culpability in that hailstorm. Wall street and the banks are and should remain culpable, especially those CEOs and investment strategists whose decisions led to this. Congress shouldn't be bailing them out, it should be arresting them for fraud.
Ultimately the right and honest thing would be to let the chips fall where they may. But instead the craven and the greedy will lead us down another path towards oligarchy. Tyranny truly is a universal human constant.
Update: here's an article at Bloomberg about what is going to happen to the dollar when the Fed creates a trillion in international debt. Of course it is too much to hope that our legislature would understand the law of conservation of energy. Also the old Newton saw: for every action there is a disastrous unintended consequence.
2 comments:
Amen, brother. I honestly don't believe that things would be so disastrous if we just let those crooked, badly managed giants fall. I'm just not convinced that there would be some global depression because some 10 or so % of mortgages in our country were stupidly handled by the companies whose responsibility was to properly handle them. The whole thing is based on inflated values of properties and somehow all of it grew exponentially because of all the corruption in the system.
Of course, down at our level if the financial system crashed we would feel some effects, but in reality none of my families assets are connected to Wall Street or the stock market, except for a couple of very modest IRAs. All of our loans and accounts are with a credit union which operates pretty independently from all of that, except for the interest rates. They never got on that 'quick profit' bandwagon of loaning money to people with terrible credit and all that.
Just that $700 billion bailout, not including the AIG and Freddid and Fannie, amounts to over $2000 per every man, woman, and child in our country.
And what's really scary to me that if Obama wins, who's he going to have in charge of all this stuff?
sorry for my typos!
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