It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?(from The Post)
I will confess to not having the business know-how to completely grapple with the current economic crazytimes. I am glad that I'm not in a financial-sector job, though am fully aware that it's all interrelated and that eventually my own profession will suffer if the economic outlook isn't improved.
That being said, why bailouts? I'm pretty damn liberal, and hold many case-specific opinions that socialism is not a universally bad idea, but this seems completely unnecessary. I mean, when you have a liberal telling you to let the capitalist market correct itself, aren't you being more than a little reactionary?
I realize it has a trickle-down effect, and it sucks that poorer folks are getting screwed out of their housing loans. I am on-board with assistance programs to try and stem this tide of foreclosures. I am not on-board with bailouts of massive Wall Street firms that should have known better. Joe Homeowner may have as much fiscal smarts as me; Jim Stockbroker is a damn professional. This is like the government giving my firm a pass for committing insurance law violations. It's our job to know that stuff.
I know this is all fluff, even more so than usual because I really, really don't know much about the markets. But it's nice to see that smarter men than I (George Will is very, very smart) feel the same way.
3 comments:
It's not as much that bailouts would be a universally bad idea, but the current bailout plan is. There is no plan of oversight and very little is understood about the breadth of the problem. All these firms/banks were buying each others loans then relending them, and so on and so on. At this point, no one can give you an exact number of what exactly is needed nor by whom.
Essentially George W.s plan right now is to hand an extremely large blank check over to the Treasury Secretary who time and again has revealed himself to be like pretty much everyone else in this administration- totally inept at his job, and then to the Wall Street firms with zero rules or oversight.
The major worry is that the money will go beyond rescuing us from complete financial collapse and into subsidizing for profit companies (where the executives make eight figure salaries) by the already strapped government and it's people, with zero repurcussions for those same executives who essentially created this problem.
In summary, we need to do something- it helps no one if our financial system completely collapses (so in theory bailouts aren't a universally bad idea). However, the semantics is where things get hairy.
a) I call shenanigans, you just cut and pasted your homework from last night into a comment. ;-)
b) I don't think bailouts are ALWAYS wrong, but you're right in that it's the lack of oversight and purpose behind it. "Throw a bunch of money" at a billion-dollar firm isn't a terrible creative idea, and I (a Joe Schmo on financial matters) can't see an upside.
These companies should fail, utterly and outright. Their employees should be let go and their various parts sold for scrap to other, more stable institutions. The bailout money should be used to help those NOT responsible mitigate the damage to their lives. Homeowners, small investors, and the like.
But screw the financial companies and their management. I don't believe the collapse of these companies will destroy our financial system--banking and the like are still strong. So we should let them fail and put in place measures to keep the same thing from happening again (i.e. the regulations that various politicians of all types dismantled in the last 30 years).
a) no, not quite. But it is the exact thing I was writing about.
b) that isn't george w.'s administration's way though. They like to incite panic in people in order to pass through anything they want. Paging the Iraq war...
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