Friday, September 19, 2008
$1.2 trillion:Bloomberg News ... reported that the government is considering establishing an $800 billion fund to purchase so-called failed assets and a separate $400 billion pool at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to insure investors in money-market funds. Plus we've got a war that's costing about $2 trillion. Insanity. Pure insanity. RELATED: Barry Ritholtz: ... for the past 8 years, a conservative was in the White House, with a very conservative agenda. For something like 16 of the past 18 years, the conservative dominated GOP has controlled Congress. Those are the facts.
We now see that the grand experiment of deregulation has ended, and ended badly. The deregulation movement is now an historical footnote, just another interest group, and once in power they turned into socialists. UPDATE: John Cole is totally correct: ... folks spent years making billions upon billions of dollars on risky transactions, more money on the stock of companies that was artificially high based on those transactions, more money bundling all those transactions into more transactions, and made a killing, and when it turns out the whole thing is a big pile of shit, you and I get the god damned bill.
I do not ever want to hear another damned word about the free market. I don’t want to hear another thing about letting the market regulate itself. I don’t want to hear about the free flow of capital. I don’t want to hear about government getting out of our lives.
None of it. From superfunds to super-bailouts, I am tired of other people getting rich being irresponsible and then being told I have to pay to clean it up. - No more bullshit about how we don't have enough money for Medicaid.
- No more bullshit about no funds for unemployment insurance.
- No more bullshit about not having enough money for safety-net programs.
- No more bullshit about "my tax money" going to other (alleged-by-the-right-wing as less-worthy) causes or people.
posted by Quiddity at 9/19/2008 10:16:00 AM
3 comments
The theory is that the full amount won't be necessary- by guaranteeing the MM funds, you'll prevent a run on them, so fewer will fail, so the backstop won't be needed.
I'm less clear on the mortgages- if they're already bad debts, the government buying them just means they're taking the liability off the holder of the note. Does the government end up owning a bunch of foreclosed homes?
There didn't turn into socialists. Socialists believe in community and don't segregate social goods to any one particular group. At least, theoretically.
These guys started out as plutocrats and oligarchs and never changed. They were always interested only in lining their own pockets and the pockets of their cronies.
gmoke wrote, These guys started out as plutocrats and oligarchs and never changed. They were always interested only in lining their own pockets and the pockets of their cronies.
Right. Which makes them "kleptocrats."
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