You know, the Paulson plan is all of THREE FREAKING PAGES long. I thought he went back to Washington so he could stay on top of this shit, but he can't read a fucking 3-page bill?

Yeah, this guy is ready for the White House.

"...a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry."

I don't understand how anybody can look at what George W. Bush has done to this country over the course of the past eight years and think that he would do anything for its benefit.

I've been trying to find the specifics of the proposed Bush plan from 2003, and I can't find anything that goes into the nuts and bolts.

Just that the Treasury Department, a.k.a. whoever was there before Henry "give me $700 billion and trust me" Paulson took charge, would assume oversight of F-May and F-Mac.

I don't have the links in front of me, but I found something that suggested that Wall Street considered F-May and F-Mac as a sort of competition that was cutting in on their profits, and Bush was, in a sense, trying to reduce their competitiveness with the private sector.

Congress should repossess Bernake and Paulson's houses.

They should repossess the house(s) of every CEO and loan shark involved in this crisis.

Oh, here's one for ya, straight from Forbes.com:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

lol I've never seen a Letterman 'bitch slap' like this before...

Shall we put the election on hold as well?

Maybe declare a state of emergency? Maybe hand over the country to Paulson with a dictatorship immunity from congressional review or.... i don't know... laws?

this is how you haggle. you start off with a crazy high-ball offer (700 billion + no oversight) and then you compromise (okay no oversight plus we reduce CEO payouts by 10%) and then congress feels powerful and paulson gets his 700 billion dollar bailout just the same.

how about you just let them go bankrupt and be done with it. the market will recover on its own.

>> ^demosthenes:


Paulson also specifically singled out the banking industry as being very strong, and a reason for people not to panic about the economy just a month ago.

Now he's saying "give me $700 billion to buy things, with no review by agency or court, and do it now, without debate".

This is exactly the same tactic that has been used by these guys time and time again to subvert our government against us. They tell us the sky is falling, and that there's no time for debate, and to just hand over all authority to them.

I say absolutely not.

If we're going to write a trillion dollar check, it's going to be to give to the people who might lose their homes, jobs, and health insurance -- let all the companies who put themselves on a house of cards fail and die.

It won't be to hand it over to a Bush appointee who used to work at Goldman Sachs to do with as he sees fit.

>> ^demosthenes:
I'm sorry, but I have to speak up.
It seems like all the sifters here just love throwing brickbats at Washington politicians. That's fine if the arguments raised are valid, but Hank Paulson is doing a god awesome job of fixing and resolving the biggest financial crisis facing America since the Depression.

Paulson is one of the reasons we're in this mess to begin with.

...the (Paulson) committee warned that U.S. regulations were scaring away capital. New stock issues were increasingly being listed on European or Asian exchanges. Foreign companies were raising capital via private offerings instead of public exchanges, to avoid the disclosure requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the liability provisions of the 1933 and '34 Securities Exchange Acts. The risk of class-action lawsuits and high director insurance rates were frightening away foreign capital, too. The solution? Dismantle much of what's left of New Deal financial regulations and some of Sarbanes-Oxley.

Source

This didn't happen by accident. It was planned this way.

I'm sorry, but I have to speak up.

It seems like all the sifters here just love throwing brickbats at Washington politicians. That's fine if the arguments raised are valid, but Hank Paulson is doing a god awesome job of fixing and resolving the biggest financial crisis facing America since the Depression.

Yes, Wall Street messed up big time, but nobody in the White House seems to be interested or competent enough to do anything about this crisis. Hank Paulson and the Fed are trying to hold the system together and this is CRUCIALLY important to prevent America slipping further into a really bad recession.

Congress should be passing this bill immediately to stabilize the ship and not dawdling on whether they should be bailing out Wall Street firms. I'm all for making the idiots in charge at Wall Street pay, but shoot the culprits after the American economy is saved, not before.

This is not a situation where you are invading a country in the hope of looking for weapons of mass destruction. The financial weapons of mass destruction HAVE ALREADY detonated on Wall Street and all of America is going to pay a sorry price for this reckless regard for risk. The issue now is containment of the fallout and how to prevent America suffering more.

And to those who think American taxpayers should not be paying for Wall Street's mistakes, think again - YOU ARE going to pay for those mistakes even if this US$700b facility doesn't go through. The check is just not upfront, but paid later on when Americans start losing your jobs and homes in a deeper recession.

>> ^rougy:
This whole thing is the result of preditory lending.
They keep trying to blame it on "sub-prime" loans, but that's not what did it.
It was caused by banks selling the loans to other banks and then the new owners of the loan bumping up the mortgage payments.
That's what made people lose their homes, because they saw their monthly payments increase as much as 400%, or more, in a matter of months.
Mark my words, this is a scam by Wall Street to bankrupt our government and steal our Social Security. They're going to run our government into the ground and then claim that there's no money left for the SS payments.


I don't think anyone ever banked on Social Security anyway, lol.

Paulson is a slimy, lying prick.

>> ^NetRunner:

Fifth, this is a global crisis, and the United States must insist that other nations join us in helping secure the financial markets.

Quite frankly, that one stimulated my gag reflex when i heard Paulson say it. Not enough that taxpayers worldwide have to pay for the economic sludge distributed by Merril Lynch and thelikes that was bought up by incompetent greedy bankers everywhere. Now they want them to buy even more of this sludge to save a financial system that is not worth saving in the first place. Why not just let the people burn their money directly, at least that'd be entertaining.

The simple fact that so few, if any, heads have rolled so far makes this whole situation even more of a joke than it already was.

His name is Henry Paulson. HIS NAME IS HENRY PAULSON!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJoikUMBG5U&feature=user
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zLpDx9xYhU&feature=user
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/billions-for-bailouts-who_b_127882.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/19/paulson-on-bailout-were-t_n_127717.html

Someone needs to ask McCain if the fundamentals of the economy are still strong even after this↓

US government rescues insurer AIG (Sept 16, 2008)

The US Federal Reserve has announced an $85 billion (£48 billion) rescue package for AIG, the country's biggest insurance company, to save it from bankruptcy.

The plan involves a loan in return for an 80% public stake in the company.

The rescue follows Monday's collapse of US investment giant Lehman Brothers, which caused share prices to plummet across the world's financial markets.

Meanwhile, Barclays said it had reached a deal to buy Lehman's US investment banking and capital markets businesses.

The rescue of AIG - which has a trillion dollars in assets and insures bank loans around the world - prompted a shares rally in Asia, with Japan's market up 2% in early trading.

The board of the Federal Reserve made the decision "with the full support of the Treasury Department", it said in a statement, adding that the secured loan included conditions designed to protect "the interests of the US government and taxpayers".

Emergency meeting

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson refused to bail out Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the US.

Correspondents say AIG's demise would have a far greater impact on the world's financial markets than Lehman's.

Many banks and investment funds in the US and around the world would lose their insurance cover at a time when defaults on payments are likely to rise.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the central bank, the Federal Reserve, met senior members of Congress late on Tuesday to brief them on the bailout.

The plan calls for the government to seize up to 80% of AIG and remove its management, similar to the way it took control of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

US President George W Bush welcomed the package, and the White House said the deal was made "in the interest of promoting stability in financial markets and limiting damage to the broader economy".

Market slump

Meanwhile, the Fed has left interest rates unchanged at 2%. The BBC's Matthew Price in New York said the bank had clearly decided an interest rate cut would not help to alleviate the short-term financial crisis.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones rallied on Tuesday, closing 141 points higher having on Monday suffered its worst day's trading since the September 2001 attacks on the US.

But leading indices across Europe and Asia ended lower, with banking shares being the worst hit. Shares in Britain's biggest savings group, HBOS, initially dropped 35% before closing 22% down.

Central banks around the world responded by carrying out emergency measures to keep markets liquid.

The Bank Of England and the Bank of Japan injected £20bn (25bn euros; $36bn) and 2.5 trillion yen ($24.1bn; £13bn) respectively into their money markets.

The extra funding came as the interest rates at which banks lend to each other rocketed - as they did at the start of the credit crunch.