As congressional leaders struggled to craft a bailout plan for the nation’s troubled financial system Thursday, angry protesters mobbed Wall Street, telephones rang off the hook in House and Senate offices and a group of prominent economists sent off e-mail blasts critiquing the proposal.
Numerous opinion polls taken this week came to wildly varying conclusions about the level of support among Americans for the Bush administration’s $700-billion plan. But the increasingly loud roar coming from all corners of the nation shows that the idea of a bailout has touched a particularly sensitive nerve among the public.
A spokesman for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said her five offices had doubled staffing to deal with the constantly ringing phones. Through late Thursday, Feinstein’s offices had received a total of 39,180 e-mails, calls and letters on the bailout, with the overwhelming majority of constituents against it. The spokesman said the volume was as great as during the immigration debate and at key points during the war in Iraq.
The public is not buying it because they don’t understand it. They don’t understand it because it was not explained to them by their congressman in a way they could understand it—because the congressmen do not understand it.
-It is not a bailout
-If we don’t do it, your local bank is going to have trouble
-Then you will have trouble.
The public does not buy it because they have no idea of the depth of the problem.
bl
It is a bailout.
If we don’t do it, our local bank (particularly if large and multistate) may well have trouble (although smaller regional banks are likely to actually do quite well as folks go back to investing in CDs rather than in stocks and bonds.
If we don’t do it, Wall Street’s fat cats will go bankrupt.
However if we do do it, we will pay for the trouble our local bank has in spades in hyperinflation and in the devaluation of our dollar.
I would prefer deflation to hyperinflation.
And I think Wall Street needs to go bankrupt.
http://www.financialsense.com/Market/wrapup.htm
I advise the following article. In point of fact, the biggest reason not to “bail” is because it will not work. There is simply too much leverage out there, and bailing simply permits Wall Street bankers to get out with their fortunes intact, before the ship sinks with US pensions aboard.
No bail outs. Prosecutions, instead.
Prosecute the perpetrators, seize all of their assets…..including their personal assets…..and equally distribute them to every person whom they hurt! And this is just for starters!
RE: “If we don’t do it, your local bank is going to have trouble . . . ”
No my local bank will not. It is very well situated, thanks.
It did not take on bad loans — not one bit. It is a local bank, and flourishing in these times. In fact, if there is no bailout — it will do even better, as customers who saved their money [which would not be me] make out like bandits buying the now no longer over-priced real estate and other hard investments.
I should add also that our real estate market is steady — down a little, but not by any means doing poorly.
Ok, ok…you guys still are not listening. Wall Street IS Main Street. All but 2 wall street firms are owned by……BANKS. It is the banks who will benefit. It is NOT a bail out. With the money, bonds will be bought. If it was a bailout, we would be giving the money away without anything in return.
As for Sarah’s local bank. They may well be fine, as long as they can survive in the banking world without the aid of the larger Central Banks. They will have trouble if the Central Banks fail and we are in a depression. Don’t believe me, ask them.
Go Google “The Great Depression” and then tell me it’s just a fat cat bailout.
I am in the financial world, there are things happening that people are not seeing.
RE: “If it was a bailout, we would be giving the money away without anything in return.”
Actually the government is planning on giving our money away without its even knowing what what they are buying is worth.
Simply catastrophic action.
As FDR said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. Panic is the enemy here, Congress must take the time to do things right and they should not allow Wall Street stampede them into taking irreversable actions.
The time to investigate this is now not after congress has bought speculators investments with taxpayers money.
The [url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122246990185780719.html]Wall Street Journal[/url] today is calling for the package to be passed, stripped of Democratic giveaways (20% of any profits to their pet slush funds — no way!) and with an independent mechanism for auctioning purchased assets, similar to the S&L;procedure of twenty years ago.
This will have to be followed by a complete revision of Fannie and Freddie, if not their elimination, and a withdrawal of the government from meddling in credit markets in the future, with the exception of fraud prevention and prosecutions and the minimum deposit requirements and so on. The use of federal pressure to get credit for people who weren’t credit-worthy, and a lot of greed, are the root causes here. It has to stop.