Today the Wall Street bailout failed in Congress. Immediately after the financial experts on television began threatening yet again that the public is too dumb to understand the problem and as a result there will be no money for mortgages, autos, credit card purchases and other needs of Main Street America.
The financial experts went so far on CNBC to say the people in Congress are limited to liberal arts and law degrees and have no understanding of the economy and that is why the bailout failed. One day the many people whose lives and pocketbooks are lined by their close relationship to Wall Street may wake up and discover their own arrogance is what is fueling the public opinion revolt against them in their efforts to raid the public Treasury.
Long ago the general public stopped paying attention to idle threats from those demanding access to the Treasury to solve all the problems of the world. The international banking cartel and financiers from around the world have made run after run on the U.S. Treasury since the days of the American revolution to the Civil War to the latest crisis resulting from the mismanagement and greed on Wall Street.
The financial experts went so far on CNBC to say the people in Congress are limited to liberal arts and law degrees and have no understanding of the economy and that is why the bailout failed. One day the many people whose lives and pocketbooks are lined by their close relationship to Wall Street may wake up and discover their own arrogance is what is fueling the public opinion revolt against them in their efforts to raid the public Treasury.
Long ago the general public stopped paying attention to idle threats from those demanding access to the Treasury to solve all the problems of the world. The international banking cartel and financiers from around the world have made run after run on the U.S. Treasury since the days of the American revolution to the Civil War to the latest crisis resulting from the mismanagement and greed on Wall Street.
Clever public relations people hired by them told them to stop talking about Wall Street and keep talking about how their problems are really the problems of Main Street but the American public knows better in spite of the public relations efforts. Today's problems on Wall Street were caused by greed, incompetent government regulation, Congress looking the other way while the financial institutions lined their pockets and campaign treasuries, and the expectation that the taxpayer could be hoodwinked into covering their losses.
Now the American taxpayer is expected to pay $700 billion to buy all the "toxic" loans that were issued by banks and mortgage companies and have resulted in a tightened credit market. What in the world makes them think the public should buy all the toxic loans and bail them out of their mismanagement and greed? If Wall Street had not started meddling in the mortgage market by packaging sub-prime mortgages when they saw how much money could be made in real estate we would have no crisis.
So they get caught with a couple of trillion in worthless mortgages and decide the American taxpayer has a responsibility to bail them out or they will cut off credit to Main Street. Where I come from that is not a request for help but blackmail. Then they say the financial integrity of our 401k, IRAs and pensions are in jeopardy if the bail out is not approved. That is second degree blackmail. The only way our pension money could be threatened is if the thieves on Wall Street invested it in the crooked stocks to begin with. Of course they did.
A reasonable way to help Wall Street while protecting the federal Treasury is possible and maybe now that the stampede to action has been halted by the vote in Congress perhaps the arrogant experts on wall Street who are demanding the handout can simply ask the stupid public for help in a nice and honest way and maybe this time they will get it.
Perhaps most important, the financial elitists and their liberal apologists had better learn humility and take responsibility for the mess we are in that they caused. Their days of unlimited feeding at the public treasury are over. The public has no responsibility to pay them for the mess they made and if we do give help, then we have every right to prosecute them if they violated the law. As for the financial television channels, turn them off, there are far better ways to spend the day.
2 comments:
Even though it's not fair and I personally disagree with it, have you considered that high levels of government have come to the conclusion that the majority of Americans are homeowners, and that majority happily participated in the housing appreciation orgy. That said, they're simply handing over the bill to the partygoers.
Plenty of houses right in this very community were involved in outright fraud:
http://tinyurl.com/46t9oy
How come you've never mentioned it?
The other part of this nasty dilemma is that Paulson and Bernanke have most likely came to the conclusion that the economy can never get back to righting itself and growing its way out of this mess as long as these toxic assets continue to sit on the books of these banks. So even though it's extremely unpopular to do it, they've decided just to buy them and move on - because letting them fester will kill the tax revenue that's the only hope of paying for the mess.
That's not to say that the greediest players are escaping punishment. Anyone who knows the score, knows that the banks getting "seized" by the FDIC were the dirtiest players. Wachovia is a prime example - even though it was "quote still solvent," it was seized and sold.
We're far from out of this mess and the losses will continue with our without the $700b. This time it's global.
Another issue is stock prices are still a joke even after this 777 point drop today. Case in point: Goldman Sachs cost $85 within the last year. Today it closed at $120. Some crash. View all the major stocks and you'll be hard pressed to find stuff worth buying today. Very few stocks are below their 52 week low.
The most hideous issue of all is the part of the American public that demands the returns of risky investments without any risk. How many times in the past week has some poor slob been in the media whining about losses in their money market mutual fund. Those funds contain risk. Albeit, they're low risk, they still have risk. The minute somebody loses money through stupidity, they demand that the government and taxpayers bail them out.
Retired folks are supposed to be out of the stock market, but many aren't, and they're still depending on stocks to support their lifestyles. That's fine, but they need to quit expecting the taxpayers to back up their losses.
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