[In Allentown, Pennsylvania] the latest details of the government’s proposed $700 billion rescue plan was not the main story in the local paper, The Morning Call, on Sept. 23 (an article about the end of a teachers’ strike was). But it is on people’s minds. For many of Allentown’s residents, the rescue is an occasion for anger, even if that feeling is at times blunted by fatigue and resignation. They dislike what goes on in Washington, but those ill feelings are nothing compared with their view of Wall Street. “People see that the chief executives of these finance companies are making millions on the backs of taxpayers,” says Ed Pawlowski, the Democratic Mayor of Allentown. They are worried about how the next generation will fare in an America that many feel has mixed up its priorities.
At Wal-Mart (WMT) SuperCenter Store #2641, Brett Slack, one of the owners of Lehigh Valley Paintball, was picking up groceries with his two-year-old daughter while his wife was at her part-time job as a cashier at Giant Food. He, like most others here, believes that the government has no choice but to intervene, since the consequences of inaction appear to be far worse. So fine: He can live with his tax money helping to prop up America’s financial system. But he wants the chief executives of those companies (unnamed by anyone in Allentown) to pay, too. “The government should go after the CEOs,” he said. “I own a business, and if I went under, the bank would come after me. They made bad decisions and figured the government would bail them out. If the CEOs end up sleeping in cardboard boxes, that would be O.K. with me. They don’t deserve to be multimillionaires.”
Slack, who is 32, has had to lay off 20 of his 35 employees in the past year as rising gas prices slowed business. He and his two partners took pay cuts, too. “That’s what CEOs and owners should do,” he says. He put all his savings into the company when he started it four years ago. “If I have money to invest one day, I’ll just start another business. I won’t invest in the stock market,” he says.
Question. If the credit markets have dried up and the U.S. government doesn’t have a $700 billion surplus in its vaults, from where will the $700 billion cash buy out come? Treasury doesn’t have $700 billion, with a $10 trillion deficit already on the books and no credit available, how does Treasury find the cash to do the bailout?
Ken [#1]: For better or worse, investors remain eager to buy Treasury securities (and thus lend to the Treasury).
Something positive had better be done this week, or we are in for a very bad depression……worldwide!