Stickers & The Bailout

[luna_k]

Hey, I got about 15 people who wanted stickers, and I only had 8 to give away (I thought I'd had 6, but apparently I had more than I thought!) so I went ahead and mailed out stickers to the first 8 people who commented. Now, my friend said he had a fuckton of leftover stickers, so I'm gonna ask him if he can spare 7 more so all the people who

Comments

[xiaomi]

The bailout thing is so frustrating... I'm of the opinion that we need to do something, although I hope the bill's failure means that the Democrats try to get a party-line vote that includes protections for workers and homeowners, rather than the GOP's insurance sham - that "insurance" plan would basically involve an outlay of federal money with no chance of recouping our investment.

But above all, we need to do something - the more stocks fall, the more companies collapse, the higher unemployment goes, and the worse the spiral gets. We have to find a bottom somewhere, and the longer this goes on, the more elusive the bottom of the spiral becomes.

It's easy to say that you want these companies to take a bath for what happened, but the problem is that each company that fails employs many tens of thousands of people, people who will probably not be able to find new work because everyone is scared to hire right now.

The answer here is re-regulation - but we can't go back and regulate retroactively :(. I'm sure once Obama gets into office we'll see serious moves to re-regulate the financial markets, which will hopefully bring long-term stability, but in the meanwhile we have to deal with the facts on the ground that right now the market is falling with no floor in sight.

One thing to keep in mind is that the bailout's goal wasn't to buy these things at a high cost - it was to buy these securities at a deep discount so that everyone knows what kind of loss will be taken - it's no longer a nebulous figure, investors and consumers will know with certainty that, say, Bank of America took a loss of 60% on the bad assets, but the bad assets are now off the books and it's safe to invest again. With people investing again, banks will start lending again (though without doing those crazy ARM and sub-prime loans), and then unemployment will start to drop as businesses can hire again.

So I find myself hoping that the Democrats organize a better bill, but doing nothing is absolutely frightening. We really are looking over the edge of a cliff at another Great Depression.