I also agree with Tsafi that America needs to take care of America and quit worrying about the rest of the world so much, but this is the best they could come up with? I've read other peoples' ideas to help us get out of this mess since this whole thing started, and their suggestions made much more sense than this so-called "bailout plan" (now they're trying to make it sound better by calling it a "rescue plan", LOL). All it does is buy them a few months, nothing more. This is part of what Chris Laird said in a recent article of his. It was very interesting:
"Now that Bailout I voted down, bailout II comes up next. Surely some new bailout manifestation will emerge this week and pass. We suspected in our Sunday newsletter Bailout I would fail to pass. But, Congress, shell shocked by fast moving events, will do something.
But it won’t work. Ultimately, even if they came up with a $1 trillion program, all it would do is buy time. I mentioned that there is $1000 trillion of various leveraged markets deleveraging, and putting up 1 trillion against that just won’t work.
I remember a year ago, when the credit crisis started in Aug 07, a banker said ‘the deleveraging will not be denied.’ How true that has proved to be.
Using some basic math, I count total US and ECB temporary lending injections at $3 trillion so far. It’s failing to stop deleveraging. It’s simple math really, $3 trillion thrown against a deleveraging $1000 trillion is not much. The central banks can lend money to banks, even taking bad assets as collateral, but it does not force lenders to lend to one another. They all know that, the truth be told, no one is admitting the extent of the bad paper they hold. So, they won’t lend in interbank lending markets, and Libor rates skyrocket. That effectively negates interest rate cuts by the central banks."
AI
