OT: The U.S. Govenment "Bailout." Barrons 3/16/09 page 14:
"A number of big banks, including GS and DB, were paid roughly $50B from the U.S. bailout of AIG last fall, the WSJ reported. The news came as lawmakers sought names of firms that received money from AIG."
San Francisco Chronicle 3/4/09 pageC2:
Est. cost of "the government's [U.S. taxpayers] package of bank bailouts, loans and economic stimulus plans" "$3 TRILLION."
(S&L crisis 1986-95: $256B)
Did they get billions without giving anything in exchange?
By definition: a Bailout does not require "anything in exchange."
"Bailout- of pertaining to, or consisting of means for relieving an emergency situation." Random House Dictionary. The "thing in exchange" is the so called relief of "the emergency situation." (In fact "the bailout" is the greatest grab of U.S. Taxpayer money in the history of the U.S.)
The "bailout" was an "Emergency rescue plan," proposed by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson [originally for $700B, which has become about $3T+ in 2009) in 2008. The governments [U.S. taxpayer] initiative was to pump liquidity into the markets and to encourage consumer and business lending [to John Q. Public]. But this is not what has happened.
Read: "Getting off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis" by John B. Taylor, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution (Conservation Think Tank at Stanford University), who was a Treasury undersecretary in Bush's first administration.
Read: "The Creature from Jekyll Island- A Second Look at the Federal Reserve" by G. Edward Griffin, to learn about the Federal Reserve and its history, a must read to understand this.
Final question: Why does not the U.S. Treasury issue it's own money, (instead of the Federal Reserve, which is actually owned by the banks themselves) and what would the effect of that be on the banks and the public of the U.S.?
P.S. Bernanke is on 60 Minutes tonight, 3/15/09.
