After one spectacular failure, the $700 billion financial industry bailout found a second life Wednesday, winning lopsided passage in the Senate and gaining ground in the House, where Republicans opposition softened.
Senators loaded the economic rescue bill with tax breaks and other sweeteners before passing it by a wide margin, 74-25, a month before the presidential and congressional elections.
In the House, leaders were working feverishly to convert enough opponents of the bill to push it through by Friday, just days after lawmakers there stunningly rejected an earlier version and sent markets plunging around the globe.
It is hard for me to believe that credit is drying up and that we should be in such a panic, when so many of us receive so many unsolicited offers of credit from so many lending institutions. I was thinking about this as I was shredding a bunch of pre-approved checks and I started to wonder if the real problem might be that there are too many Banks and lending Institutions compared to the amount of qualified (or even unqualified) borrowers. If that is the case, the government bail-out might not work as well as we are being told it would and it might be better to just let some of these institutions fail.
Does anyone know if the government or lending institutions have statistics showing the ratio of lending institutions to borrowers?
I believe a year or two from now, all of us are going to be very perturbed at the folly of this whole thing. We are being sold a pig in a poke. A very large pig in an even bigger poke.
I don’t know, #1, I’m down to three or four credit card offers a week these days.
This bill gets rid of a crucial accounting principle ‘mark-to-market’. The problem: those who hold toxic assets will no longer be required to list the assets at market value on their balance sheets; instead, they will now be allowed to pluck a number from the air and use it. Gee, you don’t think they’ll place bloated figures on their toxic sludge so that we taxpayers will be forced to ‘purchase’ them at above-market values, do you??!!??
Warren Buffett is totally opposed to this swindle by accounting rule, and we taxpayers need to let our congressman know we’re opposed to it, too!