Maybe you didn’t notice, but this weekend’s bank failure is Ameribank. Usual caveats: if you have any business with them whatsoever you’ll need to make a bunch of phone calls in the morning.
So then the $700,000,000,000 bailout plan. Yesterday a lot of people spent most of the day trying to figure out what it meant. It seems that these are the points to remember:
That $700 thousand million is a minimum number. Some people say the minimum this plan will take is more like a trillion — a Million Million Dollars.
It will set up an entire government agency. I suppose that will at least create some jobs, and maybe some of them won’t be given on the basis of party loyalty.
The dealings of that agency will not be transparent, and the agency will only answer to the Secretary of the Treasury. He’s from the government. Trust him. Right.
It still won’t help all the lending institutuions — without whom Joe and Jane Average can’t get mortgages or other credit, at all. Yes, hold your nose, but we can’t fix Joe and Jane’s problems without fixing Megabankcorp’s problems.
It is theoretically modeled on the RTC, which did its job and disbanded. This agency has an initial budget almost 12 times the initial budget of the RTC.
The agency will NOT be limited to purchasing AMERICAN assets, and helping AMERICAN taxpayers.
Nor will the agency be limited to residential properties; it will also bail out commercial developments. As a proud Las Vegas resident, I should probably consider it a good thing that they are willing to buy out some of our temporary overdevelopment!
Some smart economists can’t figure out why this is supposed to work, and have already started trying to figure out who is going to profit out of the deal.
The whole darn thing is only 3 pages long — how can you create an entire government agency and fix the economy in 3 pages? — but it includes raising the ceiling on the national debt to $11.3 million million.
Even with everything that is known, there are still huge, huge questions left to be answered.
So there you go.
In closing: Other ways to enjoy The Wizard of Oz; on Young Adult Literature; we’ll miss Amy (don’t let the new show suck!); the free markets worked so well in banking, let’s do the same thing to health insurance; and somebody doing something about the furry victims of foreclosure. Holy cow, I realize that times are tough, but abandoning a family member, just because they can? I can only imagine the horrible things running through the kids’ minds.
“… give (gave) up your heart, get (got) dumber and more scared and then every thing becomes black and white. Or, you could just follow the 2008 U.S. presidential election instead.”
horrifyingly accurate. (except for messing up your verb tenses.)