Category: Economy

painting from Sweep Da Leg

Recently, I needed some money so I could complete a project I was working on.  So I called up my friend, Tom, and I asked him if I could have $10,000.  He said he’d have to discuss it with his spouse, but then called by later and said, “Sure.  Happy to do it.  When can you pay it back?”

It’s the last sentence that’s the issue here.  Can you imagine my outrage that he wanted to be paid back, that he wasn’t just going to give me the cash?  I need a better set of friends.  I need friends who will just give me money when I say I need it.  I need friends who make gifts and don’t appear to expect anything in return.      

Maybe I should have responded to his request for repayment by telling him that very, very bad things would happen not just to him, but also to his family, and that they would all be afflicted for the next seven generations if he didn’t just pony up the cash and drop the repayment talk.  I wouldn’t explain how this would happen, or provide details.  I’d just emphasize how very, very bad things would be for him, etc etc.  It’d just be a strong threat of very bad things.  If I had said that, I think he probably would have thought I was committing a crime, trying to extort funds from him by threatening him and his family.

Maybe if I had been making many big monetary gifts contributions to Tom for the past decade, he would have considered my request for payment a “pay back” of some sort.  But I don’t have any relationships like that, where it’s about me buying a potential, future favor.  I just try to be generous when friends ask for something.  And I always ask when they will pay it back.  And I hope my friends will be generous when I ask for something.  And I don’t ask if I think that there’s any chance that I cannot pay it back.

If I lent my friends money for a business venture, I’d expect them to give me some stock in the company, or a promissory note that paid interest.  I’d expect to be protected and to be paid back. Silly  me.

So evidently, Wall Street has far better friends in Congress than I have in my life.  I hope that’s not true, but if the bailout bill passes, it will prove the point.

Maybe I could have the right kind of friends if I started befriending a new class of people, people I presently disdain for being fools and suckers.  Who else will make a gigantic gift to people who apparently don’t need it and expect nothing in return?

Please tell your Congressperson to vote no.  Not one centavo.  Not one cent.  Not one penny.  Please email and FAX and telephone them.  

I KNOW people tire of hearing the same thing 24/7 but I hope the collective will stands with the 200+ Economists from the University of Chicago who explain below just WHY they think it is counterproductive and counterintuitive to pass this shortsighted bill. (bill under the page break)

I hope today you all call and email your Senators and tell them “No way!”

I hope today you remind Congress that a softer reaming is still a reaming.

The doggie will link you to a site that has Congressional and Senatorial links for contacting them.

David Sarota on Huffpo explains the top 5 reasons not to pass it. I strongly suggest clicking over to read his whole article.

Our ‘elite’ is broken. Nobody really knows what the fuck they are doing. Nobody really knows the results of what they are doing. And to a certain extent is has to be said, they just don’t care either. They don’t care about us. All they care about is covering their own ass. At our expense. This is out and out Class War, they know, we know it, and the rest of The People seem to waking up to it.

Our financial elites don’t know and don’t care, they are in strict CYA mode, taking breaks only to figure out how to game and leverage the bailout so that they can transfer even more wealth from the taxpayers into their pocket. If things don’t turn out well, they open their Golden Parachutes and go live on a beach in the Caymans and sip rum drinks.

Stupid or evil? Conclusion: it doesn’t matter. We The People get screwed either way.

Our political ‘elite’ are even worse, they have NO clue as to what is going on. They are running around with their hair on fire in super-duper CYA mode, taking breaks only to figure out how this crisis can be maneuvered for political advantage and trying not to piss off their corporate masters, while keeping The People calm enough to not riot after assault piled on assault and insult piled on insult tax even the incredibly resilient somnabulance of Mr. and Mrs. America. As kos points out, they continue to think we are buying this crap. The party is over??? Gimme a fucking break Nancy. You are about to serve the fucking canapes, the party is just getting started. Just because you are buying their bullshit doesn’t mean we buy yours.

Stupid or evil? Conclusion: it doesn’t matter. We The People get screwed either way.

The only people who seem to have, well to be getting, a clue are The People, who are finally waking up from their slumber of post 9/11 fear and are looking around and seeing what has been going on and wondering why their ass hurts. It hurts because our ‘elite’ have been screwing them. And each time we get screwed, the ‘elites’ just tell us we have no choice but to trust them. Are they right? Are we at their mercy, no matter how badly they screw up? ARE we just sheep to be shorn by the ‘elite?”

Or will things be different this time?

Saturday was a day for summing up Presidential Debate number one. It was also the day that members of New Jersey’s People’s Organization for Progress (POP) delivered a summation of their own. They had watched two presidential candidates stand in front of a huge national television audience, hemming and hawing about bailing the US financial system out of economic catastrophe and not saying a whole lot about how the country got in this mess.

So Saturday at one, two dozen POP members wearing their trademark yellow t-shirts rolled out at Broad & Market, the historic and commercial center of Newark, to say “Save Our Houses, Don’t Bail Out Billionaires.”

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Dear Sir:

This evening while I was reading the proposed “bailout bill,” I realized that there was a terrible omission in the document.  Specifically, you forgot to try to collect any funds for the bail out from the very people responsible for the mess.  I’m not talking about the firms they’ve looted.  I’m talking about the people who have taken money from the firms and made those funds their personal property.  And, I see, you are going to require me and my family, who didn’t participate at all in the financial feeding frenzy that led to the crash depression problem, to pick up the tab.  And that the tab is a whopper.

Cross-posted from Progressive-Independence.org.

From an article by John Browne at Asia Times:

Last week, US Treasury secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke faced congressional leaders with a reported forecast that we are “literally days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system”. Apparently, the politicians were stunned into a long silence.

If citizens across the country could glimpse the horror seen by the congressmen (of which we have long warned), then widespread panic would truly be the order of the day. In particular, people will be shocked to see how Paulson’s seemingly vast request to congress for some $1 trillion is utterly dwarfed by the likely problem.

Later in the article:

If the economy moves into a severe recession and then depression, default rates will explode. These, in turn, will cause stock markets to implode, as they did in 1929. In addition, the US dollar is likely to plummet, driving up the trade deficit in the longer term. Considering these factors, many of which the government prefers to hide, things look bad – very bad.

The thing is, most Americans seem to oppose any bailout of Wall Street whatsoever.  U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein was inundated with communications from constituents demanding that she vote against giving any of their tax dollars to Wall Street, according to the Kansas City Star:

Feinstein’s office has heard from about 50,000 constituents since Congress began considering a financial rescue plan about a week ago – and “only one of a thousand supports it – whatever it is,” the California Democrat said.

Lawmakers from both parties reported similar confusion and concern among constituents as they spent their Saturday painstakingly, and sometimes painfully, trying to craft a still-elusive compromise package.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell aimed to have a final plan ready by 6 p.m. Sunday, in time for the opening of markets around the world.

But House Republicans, whose objections derailed a deal reached last week, warned they did not want any rush to judgment.

And:

The senator tends to side on most issues with Democratic liberals and moderates, but her feedback from home was similar to what conservatives were hearing. “People call us and say they’re really against bailing out fat-cats. That’s a big issue,” she said.

“We’ve heard from hundreds of people who say, ‘We pay our bills. Why can’t Wall Street pay theirs?’ ” said Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said his office had received 3,500 calls in recent days “and just 95 said they supported what we’ve done so far.”

Republicans have apparently been revolting against their own party’s dictator in the White House, seemingly out of a desire to finally look as though they oppose big government interference in the market system – earlier this month, the feds took lending giant Fannie Mae back under their control and also seized its counterpart, Freddie Mac.

Whether this is really the case is up for debate; it could all be a ploy to extend the financial crisis so as to force Democrats in Congress to cave in and write another blank check.  My gut, however, tells me there’s genuine fear that a bailout not crafted to give taxpayers at least partial ownership of the financial institutions in return for a bailout would create a massive backlash at the polls come November.

At any rate, once the bailout does go through (no matter what form it takes), shall it be enough?  According to at least one American economics writer and the foreign press, we’re already in the throes of an economic depression that began months ago.  Considering the massive U.S. debt already being passed on to an incalculable number of future generations, adding another trillion or so dollars to it doesn’t seem as though it’ll solve the problem we now face.

Hello, this is my first diary here. It has already been posted and did pretty poorly at DailyKos until being rescued. It is a story of pain and suffering and I believe it is a decent prediction of things to come.

This is an old story from 1994 that has some relevance today. It is a story from a Democratic administration but the victims were forced to deal with a Republican resolution. It is a story that I had to live through.

I live in a 3000 unit apartment complex in the Bronx. It is a massive dwelling on 22 acres that was built in 1961. There was a conversion from a rental property to a cooperative in 1987, the last breath of a housing boom. A complete renovation made the property much more desirable.  

In order to sell many apartments very quickly the holder of unsold shares steered new shareholders towards seven and ten year balloon mortgages. People believing in their own upward mobility put up ten percent and made smaller payments that paid down just a small amount of the principle.

When these balloon mortgages ended so many of those loans were with defunct savings and loans and many residents ended up at the mercy of the Resolution Trust Corporation. Not only were many tenant/shareholders in big trouble, because of the RTC it looked like the entire complex was going to fail.      

A friend sent this to me, and I want it all over the Web. Wanna help America? Demand this program.

http://gentillygirl.com/2008/0…

Well, I’m a little late to the party, but that should be OK.

It seems as if Wall Street is going to get much of what they want in this upcoming bailout bill, but they’re not going to get all of it.

From Handout to Bailout

It looks like our elected officials showed a bit of spine and common sense in taking this from ‘handout’ to bailout and have placed some checks and balances on the handing over of $700 large to the extortionists on Wall Street.

But the key aspect of this situation is that it was still extortion.

Relatively unnoticed in the MSM has been a sudden, even startling, turnaround in Chinese economic strategy in recent days. The Chinese are making it clear that they must move toward satisfying their domestic market and away from their export-driven growth model.

Here is the op-ed piece in yesterday’s People’s Daily. Note especially the last two paragraphs of the article:

Owing to the sluggish global market, more input in China’s domestic production will also give rise to the glut of goods. Therefore, in order to enable the expanded domestic demand to achieve an anticipated result, it is essential and imperative to input more in such fields as social security, medicare and health work, and education.

In other words, the main purpose of imput is definitely not to turn out more goods or to build more high-rises or skyscrapers, but to bring about more and more consumers with substantial financial strength, so that ordinary citizens in the country are better able to resist and defend against risks. Such an imput will eventually effect the long-term benign growth of Chinese economy, and China will be capable of making even greater contributions to the development of the entire world.

The Chinese Government has also directed Chinese banks not to lend to U.S. financial institutions during this ongoing financial crisis.

The Chinese see that the financial crisis in the U.S. will spread and will make their heavily export-driven growth model unsustainable. Logically enough, they are planning to move quickly toward satisfying their own domestic demand, especially for services and for a better quality of life.

The Chinese must also be having their doubts about investing in distressed U.S. companies or showing up with open checkbook at coming U.S. T-bill auctions. The prospect of an accelerating decline in the U.S. dollar will impel them to look for better places to distribute portions of their Sovereign Wealth Fund or surprlus Yuan.

More below the break….