Saturday, September 20, 2008

This isn't terrifying at all, I swears

NYT:
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration on Saturday formally proposed to Congress what could become the largest financial bailout in United States history, requesting virtually unfettered authority for the Treasury to buy up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets from financial institutions based in the United States.

The proposal was stunning for its stark simplicity: less than three pages, it would raise the national debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion. And it would place no restrictions on the administration other than requiring semiannual reports to Congress, allowing the Treasury to buy and resell mortgage debt as it sees fit...

The plan, an ambitious effort to transfer the bad debts of Wall Street into the obligations of American taxpayers, was put forward by the administration late last week, after a series of bold interventions on behalf of ailing private firms seemed unlikely to prevent a crash of world financial markets.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

So let's see... if this happens Bush will have nationalized more private assets than Hugo Chavez.

This is also a move to centralize credit into the hands of the State (The fifth plank of the Communist Manifesto).

Liberals may lean socialist but I never thought the neo-con right wing wackos would be wearing red under their sheep costumes.

It is possible that these assets will have some real market value in the future and the tax payer will see capital gain on this "investment". And monkey's might fly out my ass.

So how do I sell a call option on margin for my future tax bill?

Anonymous said...

And Frank Paulson points out that not a single FDIC insured person has lost a single penny.

Yesterday my banker pointed out that the market broke even for the week so everything is status quo.

What neither of these pinheads realize is that they are only correct because the tax payers (me and you) are giving them $700,000,000,000.00. Seems like my share of that is more than a penny, and more than the market went up this week.

I need some cool-aid.

Peter said...

One scary provision of the bill--it provides that decisions by the Secretary of the Treasury taken pursuant to the act could not be reviewed by any court or any administrative agency. Carte blanche.