What do you all think of the $700 BillionDollar Plan to Bail Out Wall Street? ( Archived) (97)

this All at once "Crisis" "Pre-emptive action" for the "Sake of the American people" Rhetoric sounds like CRAP to me. It's paramount to Blackmail "help us or else."

Sorry I'm still betting the Federal Reserve is the culprits and should be held 100% accountable for what has been transpiring with the credit fiasco.

Its time the boys club at the the Fed be held accountable and responsible.

Just read this, it sheds some light on some dark stuff;

A critical - and radical - component of the bailout package proposed by the Bush administration has thus far failed to garner the serious attention of anyone in the press. Section 8 of this legislation is just a single sentence of thirty-two words, but it represents a significant consolidation of power and an abdication of oversight authority that's so flat-out astounding that it ought to set one's hair on fire. It reads, in its entirety:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency....

The deal proposed by Paulson is nothing short of outrageous. It includes no oversight of his own closed-door operations. It merely gives congressional blessing and funding to what he has already been doing, ad hoc. He plans to retain Wall Street firms as advisors to decide just how to cut deals to value and mop up Wall Street's dubious paper. There are to be no limits on executive compensation for the firms that get relief, and no equity share for the government in exchange for this massive infusion of capital. Both Obama and McCain have opposed the provision denying any judicial review of decisions made by Paulson -- a provision that evokes the Bush administration's suspension of normal constitutional safeguards in its conduct of foreign policy and national security.


The differences between this proposed bailout and the three closest historical equivalents are immense. When the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the 1930s pumped a total of $35 billion into U.S. corporations and financial institutions, there was close government supervision and quid pro quos at every step of the way. Much of the time, the RFC became a preferred shareholder, and often appointed board members. The Home Owners Loan Corporation, which eventually refinanced one in five mortgage loans, did not operate to bail out banks but to save homeowners. And the Resolution Trust Corporation of the 1980s, created to mop up the damage of the first speculative mortgage meltdown, the S&L collapse, did not pump in money to rescue bad investments; it sorted out good assets from bad after the fact, and made sure to purge bad executives as well as bad loans. And all three of these historic cases of public recapitalization were done without suspending judicial review.

J Leno did a skit on that last night on his show, funny...

I missed it, not watching too much TV these days. Morning mastic I like your new photo.

everytime theres a crisis of any nature , the powers that be, ( not sure who that is anymore myself) demand with threats of impending doom give us unlimited unsupervised, without restriction power and we'll make it better, they are so blatant they do not even suggest they will or can make it better.... Please everyone demand that your elected representatives bring this to the floor for every section of the plan for open and public debate.

this alone would show where your elected officials true alliances and loyalties lay. remember we voted them in but these very ones crying "help us" funded them.

I know few people who lost thier homes and it took the banks 18 months to finally take it from them....so with that reasoning there is no real rush these corporations can operate in the red for a while.

Boy what a tangled web this is, I'm a country girl so I'm pretty good at following a trail but this goes in loop de loops;

Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary has confidence eroding, with critics questioning whether the Treasury Secretary's Wall Street connections have impacted his approach to the current crisis. Both progressive and conservatives and sounding the alarm...what in the past year and a half -- a period during which Mr. Paulson repeatedly declared the financial crisis 'contained,' and then offered a series of unsuccessful fixes -- justifies the belief that he knows what he's doing?

Michelle Malkin declared on Fox News: "I think that Hank Paulson's corporate...record is very important. While he was a Goldman Sachs, the company was buying up a lot of Chinese banks in particular, and at the time of his nomination, there were very serious questions raised about the conflicts of interest involved, and where his priorities are, and who he really is looking after."

Bloomberg News reported: "Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley may be among the biggest beneficiaries of the $700 billion U.S. plan to buy assets from financial companies while many banks see limited aid..."

Paulson is seeking to tackle the current crisis from too narrow an angle; in essence, ignoring the cause (the failing housing market) in favor of the symptom (the crisis among investment banks).

This crisis is ultimately driven by the falling housing market, and we will not finally get past it until the housing market stabilizes, which is why almost all economists say we're probably only halfway through this crisis. Yet, instead of trying to stop mortgage foreclosures and stabilize the housing market with loans to homeowners facing foreclosure, a Treasury headed by one of this period's leading investment bankers focuses only on loans and other bailouts for institutions that borrowed huge amounts to invest recklessly in the securities and derivatives based on those mortgages."

To some extent, the political world is still grappling with how much responsibility Paulson deserves for the current crisis he has now been tasked with remedying.

It certainly looks as if the foxes have been guarding the chicken coops here.