As the plan for saving the American banks has not been approved, the chaos seems complete in the financial world. Could this crisis be the end of the way banks work?

As I am from Europe, I'll only say my point on the European crisis as I don't know if it is equal with the American crisis.

I really think that banks should not participate anymore in the free market ideology. Banks should have a limited amount of money that they can spend in order to avoid another crisis like this. Governements are pumping our money in banks that wasted our money in making unbelievable debts, that is just a situation that shouldn't be allowed.

Well, as far as I know it already has put a stop to modern wall street pragmatism, whether the bail-out plans go through or not.

I am mixed on the issue. On one hand I can see the usefulness in saving these financial institutions to stem a possible economic metldown, yet on the other hand it is a lot of money that average American citizens would be paying via taxes, pretty much giving us the shaft even more. I'm pretty sick of it, but it seems like we're in between the hammer and the anvil here.

+ that the banks used our money to make these debts, really, I can imagine the day that our governements are going to say that we are to blame for the whole crisis.

I hope the markets will crash. I really hope they will horribly crash down. Otherwise the financial institutions will not learn from their mistakes. The bail-out plan was the most ridiculous thing I have seen in a long time. A pointless and unprecendented attempt to re-distribute money in the financial system, without any holistic approach on dealing with the underlying problems of the financial/fiscal world.

I am glad that the bail-out had been rejected, because it would have been a bad signal to the market: you do you not have to care about your current stability anymore, the government will give you money in a crisis; especially in the current situation.

The problems had been created by the financial institutions, fostered over the years by an ongoing deregulation of the markets and now the same persons who lobbied for such an approach back then, are the same who try to benefit from the bail-out; see Paulson. What an irony. Surely beyond anything 3rd class writers would be able to write.

Yes while a crash would be good to reform the theoretics and ideals on which the market is based, one also has to look at the problem from a realistic and practical point of view. Is this crash going to have a huge negative impact on the world and the US (where the most severe levels of recession will take place, surely). What can we do to stop a large scale economic meltdown? If the bail-out will help to prevent that, then maybe the benefits outweight the cons in this instance. Reform, although unlikely, can still happen without a (near?)fatal blow to our economy.

Yes, the negative outcome of the crash is something that your government tries to tell you, because they need an immediate reason to pass this piece of legislation. I do not believe it. There is a lot of resilience in the markets and why should it crash? The whole going down of the indices is merely because of expectations. The fundament of the market is good and as we have a lot of well going economies, the basis is there to deal with such a crisis, as long as it is managed well. In contrast to the one in the thirties, there is no spill-over to the trading of goods on a global level.

A problem is the high price of oil as well as the weak dollar, but with a strong Euro, we can also deal with that as we are not dependent on one currency. The problem is YOUR government, this endless warmongering that is going on over all these years now. The high amount of debts of the US. With some good politicians and with the help of qualified scientists(*) the whole matter could be solved and managed appropriately. To do it in a rush, like it is attempted now, is the worst thing you can do. Markets will regulate themselves and if you manage them, they will do so.

(*) did you happen to see their voices come into play in the ongoing discussion about the bail-out? Curious isn't it?

I don't have the education to really speak on firm grounds regarding this, do you? I'd like to know why you think that this isn't a very bad thing.

I do not see the crisis. I see no spill-over. There is something wrong with the banking system, but you do not solve the problem by throwing money into a black hole. The rest of the system works fine; this is the contrast to the thirties.

I could argue with system-theorie as well as economy theorie, but I have to admit that I am rather focussed on the management of firms than on economies.

and ... the whole crisis issue started years back; look at Spain and the problems they have currently. There had been ample signs all over the place but they were ignored; because the economist said: the market will regulate it; the problem is that politicians believed this. :s

The first thing you need to do is regulate the finance sector again. It is like a hot balloon and you need to get the surplus of air out. A lot of assets and goods are rated way too high currently and you have to deal with this issue now; you have to get to the core of it all. A lot of management of the mortgages is necessary as well as something to deal with the crisis in the real estate sector. You need to help the people ... they need the help. What good will come out of throwing the money into the wallets of Wallstreet?

you should watch this:
http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2008/9/25
Ralph Nader asks the right questions ...
and he is right.

I think Jim Cramer has outlined why it might be necessary:

http://donklephant.com/2008/09/29/why-t ... -is-right/

When a CEO make $600,000 a day, something is wrong. Part of me thinks these greedy companies deserve to go belly up.

Still, I'm depending on my 401k for my retirement, and I don't want that to evaporate.

I guess in the long run, if the buy out works, and the Federal goverment makes most of it's money back then we'll be OK.

Short term, I don't like the idea of the government owning so much of the market. We can only hope or pray they don't screw this up.

I guess what pisses me off most is that the government would never spend this much to feed the hungry or help working class people. Some major changes need to be done to prevent this situation from happening again. (Salary caps, better regulation, as opposed to just more regulation.)

I'm sure a lot of people are going to jump on the 'blame Bush' bandwagon, but most of this started with the Clinton administration. He wanted to make it easier for people to get mortgages, but people ended up buying houses they couldn't afford, or were suckered into high-interest/adjustible rate loans. No one anticipated that fuel, energy, and food prices would skyrocket, and no one anticipated the aggressive practices of lenders. It wasn't thought through carefully enough.

<<it shoud have been done two weeks ago>>
some years would be better in my opinion.

His point of view is the neo-liberal. He wants the government to throw money into the market but without any kind of regulation (1:50-2:02).

He does to answer on the oversight aspect that Paulson had proposed. This is a crucial aspect of the whole package as it would give an unprecedented amount of power to the ministry of finance.

The problem with what Jim Cramer is proposing is: the government would buy the mortages, but without the 'best' price. A lot of money will be wasted in the process, because the whole concept lacks oversight. Further does he not shed light how the people would benefit from this bail-out and how it can help those who have lost their homes; due to the crumbling of the mortages.

Judging from the books JC has written I would not see him as a good source when it comes to such issues. He is too focused on the economy.

Where did you find that information?

That is patr of the problem. In the bail-out plan, there is no limit set for the salaries CEOs of the affected banks.

Currently you do not know what you get for the money that is thrown into the market. You have 700 billion available, but if you get back the same amount of it can be highly doubted. By the way, who says that this will be the last bail-out? Perhaps more money is needed.

I am suprised as a European how readily the money was made available. Bush has often rejected social projects because the money 'was not available', but now it seems to grow on trees.
Clinton with his deregulation and Alan Greenspan did their share to get the situation as messy as it is. The current American government failed to react to the signs of the market and set the stage for necessary reforms.

which one?

there is an interesting statement in a German forum:

Das Bankensterben ist nicht die Krise, es ist die Kur
The crashing of the banks is not a crisis, it is the cure.

Die Rezession ist das reinigende Gewitter einer jeden Marktwirtschaft. Sie wird die Blender vernichten und realen Unternehmergeist stärken.

The recession is like a cleansing thunderstorm in the economy. It will extinguish the dazzler, but promote the spirit of the real economists.

well said.

I am glad the House voted down the bill. It was close (228-208 against) but not close enough that a revote will be tallied in the coming days. The whole bill laughs in the face of the average American and needs to be overhauled.

And this is not left-wing, anti-Bush speak. House workers published the bill online before the vote. I read it this morning and it's pointless. All the provisions come with "out" clauses so that they can basically be ignored, which leaves We The People giving the ultra rich an additional $700B USD.

Economic collapse will not happen until China decides that we need to pay our debts to them.

They could decide that today and it would do nothing.

They wouldn't want to bankrupt their best customer, anyway.

Aussie and New Zealand economies fell 4-5percent today..... Things are expensive as they are

The banks are the primary culprits of the violent business cycles that have plagued America for the past century, I'm not approving of any kind of bail out until a full investigation of the banking system is done to discover what impact the inflationary and eradic interest rate manipulation of the Federal Reserve Bank cartel has had on these recent events. Instead of simply firing a few patsy scapegoats like the SEC chairman, let's try auditing the entire banking system and assessing the overall concept of our system of credit. And if this proves to be the source of the problem, maybe we need to consider nationalizing the Federal Reserve Bank and have the congress reclaim it's original authority to regulate the cash flow with full public scrutiny. No more secret sessions, no more privacy in the realm of public domain.

And God bless those Democrat and Republican congressman who had the balls to vote down that piece of shit bailout package, which was essentially a giant, coerced bonus to a bunch of Wall Street scum.

I can not be happier that the bail-out bill failed. The last thing America needs is more money that they don't have pumped into the system. Think about it, in order to prevent the dollar for falling even more, the government is going to print off MORE money to give to wall street, which in turn will just increase inflation, making the problem even worse than it already is.

The funny thing is that when I was watching CNN, a member of the stock market actually said something along the lines of "Typical of the government. Like always." So basically blaming the government for the troubles of wall street. Well, what happened to a free market? Isn't the American free market proud of the fact that the government interferes with economy as little as possible? Why use the government as your scapegoat when it is partially your own fault as well. (Believe me, I'm not defending Bush at all. As far as economic presidency is concerned, he was by far the worst in history, next to Calvin Coolidge.)

Let the economy fix itself, this is Obama's failing. Don't force more money into, that will ruin it even more. Leave it to function like it normally does, and although it will take some time, it will work itself out. Either that, or adopt another new deal, which won't work since America well reject a
socialist notion like that too quickly in this era.

As far as banks are concerned, they have far too much power. /they really do. I've always believe that the economy, the most important thing to the state, should be under control of the state, since its so vital to the well being of it. Its far too risky letting it live on its own, as is evident with this crisis.

I think they should just design and print a One Hundred Billion Dollar bill. That way, they would only have to print 700 of them, which would save paper and printing costs.

That's really the root of the issue. When currency gets scarce, the Federal Reserve just prints more, which makes every individual dollar lose value.

Here is an excellent article explaining the full horror of the finacial crisis:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... omicgrowth
Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.

You can see it in the way America's dominion has slipped away in its own backyard, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez taunting and ridiculing the superpower with impunity. Yet the setback of America's standing at the global level is even more striking. With the nationalisation of crucial parts of the financial system, the American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated. In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have lectured other countries on the necessity of sound finance. Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina and several African states endured severe cuts in spending and deep recessions as the price of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which enforced the American orthodoxy. China in particular was hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China's success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are currently going bust. How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.

Despite incessantly urging other countries to adopt its way of doing business, America has always had one economic policy for itself and another for the rest of the world. Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future.

Which version of the bail out of American financial institutions cobbled up by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is finally adopted is less important than what the bail out means for America's position in the world. The populist rant about greedy banks that is being loudly ventilated in Congress is a distraction from the true causes of the crisis. The dire condition of America's financial markets is the result of American banks operating in a free-for-all environment that these same American legislators created. It is America's political class that, by embracing the dangerously simplistic ideology of deregulation, has responsibility for the present mess.

In present circumstances, an unprecedented expansion of government is the only means of averting a market catastrophe. The consequence, however, will be that America will be even more starkly dependent on the world's new rising powers. The federal government is racking up even larger borrowings, which its creditors may rightly fear will never be repaid. It may well be tempted to inflate these debts away in a surge of inflation that would leave foreign investors with hefty losses. In these circumstances, will the governments of countries that buy large quantities of American bonds, China, the Gulf States and Russia, for example, be ready to continue supporting the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency? Or will these countries see this as an opportunity to tilt the balance of economic power further in their favour? Either way, the control of events is no longer in American hands.

The fate of empires is very often sealed by the interaction of war and debt. That was true of the British Empire, whose finances deteriorated from the First World War onwards, and of the Soviet Union. Defeat in Afghanistan and the economic burden of trying to respond to Reagan's technically flawed but politically extremely effective Star Wars programme were vital factors in triggering the Soviet collapse. Despite its insistent exceptionalism, America is no different. The Iraq War and the credit bubble have fatally undermined America's economic primacy. The US will continue to be the world's largest economy for a while longer, but it will be the new rising powers that, once the crisis is over, buy up what remains intact in the wreckage of America's financial system.

There has been a good deal of talk in recent weeks about imminent economic armageddon. In fact, this is far from being the end of capitalism. The frantic scrambling that is going on in Washington marks the passing of only one type of capitalism - the peculiar and highly unstable variety that has existed in America over the last 20 years. This experiment in financial laissez-faire has imploded.While the impact of the collapse will be felt everywhere, the market economies that resisted American-style deregulation will best weather the storm. Britain, which has turned itself into a gigantic hedge fund, but of a kind that lacks the ability to profit from a downturn, is likely to be especially badly hit.

The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot. Like the Soviet collapse, it will have large geopolitical repercussions. An enfeebled economy cannot support America's over-extended military commitments for much longer. Retrenchment is inevitable and it is unlikely to be gradual or well planned.

Meltdowns on the scale we are seeing are not slow-motion events. They are swift and chaotic, with rapidly spreading side-effects. Consider Iraq. The success of the surge, which has been achieved by bribing the Sunnis, while acquiescing in ongoing ethnic cleansing, has produced a condition of relative peace in parts of the country. How long will this last, given that America's current level of expenditure on the war can no longer be sustained?

An American retreat from Iraq will leave Iran the regional victor. How will Saudi Arabia respond? Will military action to forestall Iran acquiring nuclear weapons be less or more likely? China's rulers have so far been silent during the unfolding crisis. Will America's weakness embolden them to assert China's power or will China continue its cautious policy of 'peaceful rise'? At present, none of these questions can be answered with any confidence. What is evident is that power is leaking from the US at an accelerating rate. Georgia showed Russia redrawing the geopolitical map, with America an impotent spectator.

Outside the US, most people have long accepted that the development of new economies that goes with globalisation will undermine America's central position in the world. They imagined that this would be a change in America's comparative standing, taking place incrementally over several decades or generations. Today, that looks an increasingly unrealistic assumption.

Having created the conditions that produced history's biggest bubble, America's political leaders appear unable to grasp the magnitude of the dangers the country now faces. Mired in their rancorous culture wars and squabbling among themselves, they seem oblivious to the fact that American global leadership is fast ebbing away. A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.

The banks have done similar things over here. In issuing lots of sub-prime loans, the banks stood to gain, because the worse the loan is, the more securities they get from Wall Street. If people can't pay their loans, it's the banks that collect the insurance. Concordantly, bank execs make bonuses based on the quantity of loans they issue, not the quality. So, sub-prime loans were fine and dandy by them.

However, the big insurance companies are out of money now. The problems with this situation cannot possibly be overstated. If insurance companies don't have any money, then they in turn can't bail out the banks. If the banks have no money, they can't issue small loans to Joe Dirt. If Joe Dirt doesn't get a loan, he can't start a small business, or employ more people in the small business he already has. All the other Joes can't borrow money to buy a car or mortgage a house. Joe can't marry his sweetheart, can't get a new job, can't do anything, really. I hate to say it, but as an American who actually has a cursory understanding of what's going on here, I am entirely dependent on Congress to get a bail-out bill passed. We need this badly.

So, which is it? Do you want a free market, or are you in favor of a statist, centralized policy? Your post seems to indicate you want it both ways.

The bail-out is necessary. Obviously, it's not desireable. I can understand why Americans wouldn't want their government to bail out the people that got them into this mess, but the fact is that we have a giant shit sandwich here, and if there is no bail-out we're all going to take a bite.

I think you're totally wrong about the bail-out plan, which was proposed as a result of a meeting between the SEC, the Fed, and a bunch of legislators, after which the legislators walked out going, 'Holy shit, we're fucked. We'd better do something now.'

However, I do agree with what you're saying about the banks. The problem is that we just don't have the time to fully address all the systemic things you're talking about. That's why we have a bail-out bill. Just the phrase 'bail-out' tells you this is a last ditch effort, and that the ones that can do something about our financial crisis -- the ones that didn't have the foresight to see it coming -- need to put something together as quickly as possible, because otherwise Great Depression II is not out of the realm of possibility.

Also, the SEC chairman doesn't have to be a patsy. The problem is that he was, which is why the banks were getting away with issuing poor quality loans. I actually agree with McCain that Andrew Cuomo would be a strong choice to take things over at the SEC. Apparently, the guy's a real hard-ass.

I would agree that in the time and money spent investigating these banks, lenders, etc, the market would have totally fallen, resulting in a global depression. The market is falling too fast.

As pissed as I am about the whole thing, I'd prefer not to have to stand in long lines for bread and water.

statist, centralized policy

my argument with leaving the economy to work itself out is really the only current way that the CURRENT economy would be fixed. I highly doubt that an authoritarian revolution would be looked upon favourably by the American populace.

I don't believe the bailout is necessary. We're supposed to be living in a free market system but what's the point when banks and other financial institutions never realize the risk of their own decisions? This creates a lot of distortions in the market, mainly that of moral hazard that says "you can make a lot of stupid business and investment decisions, like leveraging up 300% or giving out ridiculous loans, but don't worry because you have the taxpayer ready to fit the bill if you're ever in danger of going under." We actually reward that behavior with this 700 billion dollar bailout. No, this will just create bigger problems down the road. After all, how did we get here? It's been a culmination of this bailout mentality policy makers have had for decades. We just passed a bill that would give 25 billion dollars to automakers, some of which wouldn't exist today if we didn't bail them decades ago. Now everyone is lining up to get money from the government. Because even though you can't get money from the people as consumers for being a good business (because they're not good businesses), you can still get it from them as taxpayers. And then people are saying we could make a profit out of this ordeal, but when has government ever been accurate with their numbers? Right now it's 700 billion dollars. Next year it will be a trillion plus dollars. Wasn't Iraq only going to cost us less than 100 billion dollars, and the oil that we got from Iraq would eventually pay for the war?

Secondly, I don't think Hank Paulson et al. are being honest with us here. Their plan is to buy up securities of these home loans (many of which foreign investors and foreign banks hold. In fact, there are people saying that this could be more a bailout, or perhaps a quid pro quo, for foreign countries and foreign banks than for Main St. or even Wall St. For more details, look here)--why doesn't the government just make sure people can stay in their homes? I mean, at least if you're of the interventionist mentality, there are many other ways of doing this. Recently about 300 economists have objected to Paulson's bill but I would assume the majority of them aren't laissez-faire; they think there are better ways. Fact is, nothing ever good comes when crap like this is rushed (remember the Patriot Act anyone, the Iraq war as I mentioned earlier etc.?). Hanky Panky just wants to bailout his buddies, or delay this problem so that he can pass it on to the next administration and get away without having to face the biggest financial problems. That's what Alan Greenspan did before the housing crash which his horrendous monetary policy in part caused (of course he denies he had anything to do with it). Ultimately, I don't think we can escape this economic mess. On one hand, I believe, we can experience hyperinflation by trying to bail out the system by throwing money at it; on the other hand we'll experience deflation by letting the system collapse on itself. Either way, the economy is so out of whack it has to correct. Any "solution" to it will not be without pain.

If you want to know the macro picture of how we got to this situation, I think Peter Schiff describes it perfectly at his 2006 speech to mortgage bankers in this video series (his many predictions of the past few years have been spot on): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Edit: It's been said that some of these financial institutions are "too big to fail" but I like Bernie Sanders' response to this: if they're too big to fail, then they are also too big to exist. Don't we have anti-trust policies that can prevent firms from getting too big to fail? The OP mentioned bank reform, and I just got to say that I think fractional reserve lending is a sham.

The fact that the Federal Reserve Bank was involved alone is reason to oppose the hell out of it, and I am hopeful that myself and the other voters who forced that last one to fail will force the next one to fail. Those people basically own most of this country and they own more and more of it everytime they levy that damned inflation tax on the people and coerce more wealth from them.

The SEC guy is always the fall guy, and a few years from now Andrew Cuomo (who like McCain, has plenty of Mafia connections) will either preside over the exact same nonsense (these market corrections occur every 5 to 10 years, and the people always get screwed by whatever legislation gets passed in the process) or somehow manage to find the magic bullet that continues to fatten the pockets of the bankers while making the common people of America love the chains they continue to wear.

On a final note, the time factor is exactly how horrid stuff gets passed, for example, that stupid Patriot Act. I don't care if God's wrath is about to be rained upon all within the 4 corners of the earth, the sky begins to fall, Osama Bin Laden gets hold of some nukes, or whatever ridiculous excuse these corporate media liars cook up, if no one has time to truly debate the bill, it doesn't pass if I have anything to say about it.

House Republicans are overheard stating they feel guilty and have second thoughts about voting down the bill yesterday. Now the Senate have picked up the measure and are talking about new conessions to make. A vote is expected today.

This all reminds me of the 2000 election - in that it really doesn't matter what the We-The-People say: the powers that be are determined and will not be denied. Only this time they want to blow a 700 billion dollar hole in our colelctive ass.

A few thousand angry calls to every single one of these linguini spined scumbags will get them back in line. If you don't want your ass to get the shaft, don't just bend over and take it, do something.

I'm in Seattle - every member of Government is against this bill - so I don't have to do anything but worry about the Bible Belt Republicans.

If you have any friends out in that area, call them. My representative Patrick Murphy (democrat) voted for it, and he's going to catch hell from me.

I am glad this plan failed through. The economy is crashing, but who is this plan designed to rescue? the very ones who caused the disaster while earning billions of dollars. These large firms filing bankruptcy that we're supposed to be rescuing are run by multi-million dollar CEOs. They certainly don't need rescuing. If they were given this money, what would happen? Everything would repeat.

A large component of the current crisis has been our speculation market. This atrocious institution, which seeps away money for doing nothing, encouraged investors falsely to invest in a housing market destined to die because of loans that could never be payed back. These high-risk mortgage loans were seen as a quick way to make money by banks, and when everybody defaulted Wall Street looked around, flabberghasted.

Firstly, if the current problem is to be rectified it needs to be with the homeowners and the ones who received loans, not with the big institutions that made money off of such a failure. This can be done by drastically lowering interest rates (or eliminating them altogether) and lowering over-bloated loans to reasonable sizes. Then there should be a serious restructuring of our economy and the way money travels. A free market with the added layers of usury and speculation is bound to thieve money from the cash-earners and cause problems like these.

But the situation was caused by two stupid sides - the poor once again thoughtlessly getting loans to buy property they could never afford, and the banks and institutions that granted them these loans. This is why I'm reluctant in supporting the people who defaulted on their mortgage payments; but aiding them should be a secondary effect of the path to helping restore the economy. Again, no money needs to go to the failed institutions that got the economy in this mess. Let the best institutions that held steady to their principles, to planning and long term thinking, survive, and let the trend-hoppers fall.


On a side note, here's an interesting debate on the issue. Pay special attention to Bruce Marks, but take the rest of the argument with a grain of salt (and ignore the rest of the website): http://www.democracynow.org/2008/9/30/b ... se_rejects

The bail-out is only a temporary, quick fix. We may all sleep easy tonight if it's passed (it's going through the House again), but in the long run this situation is going to come back and bite us in the ass. When Reagan introduced his plan to end stagflation, he acknowledged that there would be some rough times. But he eventually was able to curb the inflation crisis after a couple years (ignore his policy on taxing). This is what we need now, better the people suffer for a year now than ten years later. Like many people have pointed out, this is not 1929.

I hate to be the bearer of reality, but the U.S. economy cannot function without those ultra rich Wall Street scum who caused this disaster while earning billions of dollars. Wall Street and Main Street are not separate. Your pension fund most likely comes from Wall Street at least in part, your local community bank is likely connected somehow to the big Wall Street banks, and your city probably had some of its current programs and future ones dependent on bonds sold on Wall Street . The people who caused this mess don't live in some isolated cabin in the middle of the woods of Montana, and their companies do not live on an economic island. Everything is connected today. Sort the mess out first with a responsibly made bailout with proper oversight, wait till the markets have something resembling confidence, and then get rid of the scum, or at least marginalize their future influence.


We can't afford to lose another 1.2 trillion dollars for every day you want to punish the banking system. It can wait.

I think they should think about taking the money from those multi-million-dollar-CEOs (who IMO are responsible for this mess) to fill the financial hole first, before they "steal" it from the people. Those rich fuckers have earned enough cash (legally or illegally) to easily com up withat least a large part of the 700 billions. You scratch it, you bought it.

I live and work on a farm, I don't have a pension and frankly I don't believe in the concept, so you speak only for yourself and those who have been foolish enough to put their faith in this corrupt system. I'll be happy making my own bread, keeping my own chickens, and plowing a field if that's what it takes to survive this artificially created downturn. The FED, the SEC and the federal government can kiss my ass and go fuck themselves if they think I'm going to agree to paying for more CEO bonuses and bad credit. Frankly, all of the people who are connected to this deserve what they get as far as I'm concerned, they've bolstered a corrupt system and will reap what they sewn.

That's nice and everything, but the majority of people living in this country have no means of doing that.

I'm missing the part where it's the responsibility of self-sufficient people to pay for other people to continue being slaves to their creditors. Besides, anyone who actually believes that the inevitable recession/depression that's coming will be averted by this is living a pipe dream. A good year or so of economic tumult will be a good lesson for people who think they can live their lives as serfs, serving their lords in this modern fuedalist system.

P.S. - Here's a good video depicting the nature of the people who've constructed this system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvsADU2OOWM