Posted by Espo22
i think the one thing we can all agree on is that 'WE'RE SCREWED'![]()
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Posted by TheLadyJ
Posted by Espo22
i think the one thing we can all agree on is that 'WE'RE SCREWED'![]()
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I'm quoting that for truth.
But I still think this bail-out plan is a bad idea. I can't find anyone who thinks it is a good idea. yet, our government is going ahead with it......
Okay this may be a totally dumb question but is there a possibility that even with this loan AIG could still go down??
Posted by Espo22
I know and the bad part is that if we dont do it, it will be bad anyways. I mean hopefully they can come up with a plan that will be better but im not holding my breath. I mean if we're going to get taxed more then wont there also be less spending and again doesn't help the economy out. But then again if these companies go bankrupt things will get worse.
They let it get so bad that no matter what they do, its a lose-lose situation.
Posted by Songstress
Okay this may be a totally dumb question but is there a possibility that even with this loan AIG could still go down??
Posted by TheLadyJ
Posted by Espo22
I know and the bad part is that if we dont do it, it will be bad anyways. I mean hopefully they can come up with a plan that will be better but im not holding my breath. I mean if we're going to get taxed more then wont there also be less spending and again doesn't help the economy out. But then again if these companies go bankrupt things will get worse.
They let it get so bad that no matter what they do, its a lose-lose situation.
Yes, but it will be bad and THEN we can start to recover. This bail-out plan will only keep the economy artifically inflated for a few more years and then it will be the next guy in office's problem when everything crashes again.
someone said this plan is like putting a band aid on a bullet hole.
I think is more like using glue to prevent a house from collapsing. It will eventually collapse, but once it does you can rebuild it correctly. If our government uses all their glue to fix this, when it comes time to build the house they want, there will be nothing left.
Posted by Songstress
Posted by TheLadyJ
Posted by Espo22
I know and the bad part is that if we dont do it, it will be bad anyways. I mean hopefully they can come up with a plan that will be better but im not holding my breath. I mean if we're going to get taxed more then wont there also be less spending and again doesn't help the economy out. But then again if these companies go bankrupt things will get worse.
They let it get so bad that no matter what they do, its a lose-lose situation.
Yes, but it will be bad and THEN we can start to recover. This bail-out plan will only keep the economy artifically inflated for a few more years and then it will be the next guy in office's problem when everything crashes again.
someone said this plan is like putting a band aid on a bullet hole.
I think is more like using glue to prevent a house from collapsing. It will eventually collapse, but once it does you can rebuild it correctly. If our government uses all their glue to fix this, when it comes time to build the house they want, there will be nothing left.
I agree with this completely
We are def. screwed. I dont know anybody that thinks this is a good idea. They are just delaying what is bound to happen.
Posted by TheLadyJ
Posted by Espo22
I know and the bad part is that if we dont do it, it will be bad anyways. I mean hopefully they can come up with a plan that will be better but im not holding my breath. I mean if we're going to get taxed more then wont there also be less spending and again doesn't help the economy out. But then again if these companies go bankrupt things will get worse.
They let it get so bad that no matter what they do, its a lose-lose situation.
Yes, but it will be bad and THEN we can start to recover. This bail-out plan will only keep the economy artifically inflated for a few more years and then it will be the next guy in office's problem when everything crashes again.
someone said this plan is like putting a band aid on a bullet hole.
I think is more like using glue to prevent a house from collapsing. It will eventually collapse, but once it does you can rebuild it correctly. If our government uses all their glue to fix this, when it comes time to build the house they want, there will be nothing left.
Posted by Songstress
Okay this may be a totally dumb question but is there a possibility that even with this loan AIG could still go down??
Yes, it is entirely possible. Which is why this is a not a guaranteed fix. Which is why this is only delaying the inevitable.
AIG is a bank insurer. Which means, when you get a loan from the bank, the bank ensures the loan through AIG. If you can't pay, AIG pays for you. So, AIG was shelling out ALOT of money to banks. So, by bailing out AIG and not bailing out the people with the failing mortgages in the first place, they've really solved nothing.
And sorry, but I have no idea about college loans.
Posted by KittyGags
I got this email and I'm keeping the writer anonymous, but I thought it was AWESOME!
Now here's a bail out plan that works!
I'm against the $85,000,000,000 bailout of AIG.
Instead, I'm in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in 'We Deserve It Dividend'.
To make the math simple, let's assume there are 200,000,000
bonafide U.S. Citizens 18+.
Our population is about 301,000,000 ± counting every man, woman
and child. So 200,000,000 might b e a fair stab at adults 18 and up..
So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billon that equals $425,000.00.
My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a
'We Deserve It Dividend'.
Of course, it would NOT be tax free.
So let's assume a tax rate of 30%.
Every individual 18+ has to pay $127,500.00 in taxes.
That sends $25,500,000,000 right back to Uncle Sam.
But it means that every adult 18+ has $297,500.00 in their pocket.
A husband and wife has $595,000.00.
What would you do with $297,500.00 to $595,000.00 in your family?
Pay off your mortgage - housing crisis solved.
Repay college loans - what a great boost to new grads
Put away money for college - it'll be there
Save in a bank - create money to loan to entrepreneurs.
Buy a new car - create jobs
Invest in the market - capital drives growth
Pay for your parent's medical insurance - health care improves
Remember this is for every adult U S Citizen 18+ including the folks
who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers and every other company
that is cutting back. And of course, for those serving in our Armed Forces.
If we're going to re-distribute wealth let's really do it...instead of trickling out
a puny $1000.00 ( 'vote buy' ) economic incentive that is being proposed
by one of our candidates for President.
If we're going to do an $85 billion bailout, let's bail out every adult U S Citizen 18+!
As for AIG - liquidate it.
Sell off its parts.
Let American General go back to being American General.
Sell off the real estate.
Let the private sector bargain hunters cut it up and clean it up.
Here's my rationale. We deserve it and AIG doesn't.
Sure it's a crazy idea that can 'never work.'
But can you imagine the Coast-To-Coast Block Party!
How do you spell Economic Boom?
I trust my fellow adult Americans to know how to use the $85 Billion
'We Deserve It Dividend' more than I do the geniuses at AIG or in
Washington DC.
And remember, this plan only really costs $59.5 Billion because
$25.5 Billion is returned instantly in taxes to Uncle Sam.
Ahhh...I feel so much better getting that off my chest.
You don't want to even hear what I think about the stupid mortgage companies
that loaned out billions of dollars to people who they knew had no way of paying
back the loans, with both sides of the equation interested in one thing...fast money.
But it didn't work, and now we're supposed to bail out those idiots too???
Posted by Kricket212
It is hurting everyone, everywhere. I work for the USPS as I have said and even we are in trouble.
My FH is in a large Retail make up company but works in fiance. He said nobody is buying....
Even the coffee guys in NYC on corners said on news last night business is down 50%.
Posted by KittyGags
I found another article, written by Ron Paul, the man who'd be getting my vote for President if we weren't so wrapped up in party politics.
My Answer to the President
Dear Friends:
The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.
We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.
Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I’d only be repeating what I’ve been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.
Still, at least a few observations are necessary.
The president assures us that his administration “is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets.” Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?
We are told that “low interest rates” led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.
Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or “wildcat capitalism” (as if we actually have a pure free market!).
Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: “Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk.”
Doesn’t that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn’t that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn’t the federal government shown that the “many” who “believed they were guaranteed by the federal government” were in fact correct?
Then come the scare tactics. If we don’t give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary “the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet.” Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.
It’s the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.
The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.
F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:
Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.
To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end… It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.
The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.
The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?
Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a “rescue plan”? I guess “bailout” wasn’t sitting too well with the American people.
The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you’re supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.
I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.
H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
In liberty,
Ron Paul
Posted by wifetobe
Posted by KittyGags
I found another article, written by Ron Paul, the man who'd be getting my vote for President if we weren't so wrapped up in party politics.
My Answer to the President
Dear Friends:
The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.
We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.
Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I’d only be repeating what I’ve been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.
Still, at least a few observations are necessary.
The president assures us that his administration “is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets.” Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?
We are told that “low interest rates” led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.
Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or “wildcat capitalism” (as if we actually have a pure free market!).
Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: “Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk.”
Doesn’t that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn’t that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn’t the federal government shown that the “many” who “believed they were guaranteed by the federal government” were in fact correct?
Then come the scare tactics. If we don’t give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary “the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet.” Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.
It’s the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.
The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.
F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:
Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.
To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end… It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.
The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.
The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?
Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a “rescue plan”? I guess “bailout” wasn’t sitting too well with the American people.
The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you’re supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.
I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.
H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
In liberty,
Ron Paul
Just wanted to give a big shout out to Ron Paul!!! I was pulling for him!!!! Damn shame!!!!![]()
