Does Anyone feel like Bailing

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by Aliantha

According to the OECD, Australia is in the best shape in the developed world financially, and they've put it down to the govt stimulus packages, along with fairly strict regulations on banking and investments.

My point is of course that it might be too soon to tell if the stimulus package put together by your govt will boost your economy due to its size.

People here won't give it time, and they won't take into account how many people weren't laid off or fired because of the stimulus. All they do is quote how many jobs have not been created. When Obama said those things, it was before we knew how bad it was going to be.

And it's looking like we didn't do enough, like we might need another stimulus, which is what some economists were saying from the beginning, that it wasn't big enough. I just hope, if they do another one, it is all about jobs and infrastructure, and not about tax cuts.

We should be building highspeed rail systems, and hydrogen highways, and giving money to people who are building green cars and green energy companies, and giving money to people to solarize their homes or put in personal wind machines. THAT would create jobs, LOTS of them. Fuck the "cap and trade" legislation, just give the money to people who will create the alternatives, and it will work itself out. I think if people had a choice, most of them would choose to get their power from a green source.

[TheMercenary]

Funny Cartoon from the years of the past. Sound familiar?

[classicman]

Sounds like the D's learned very well from the R's how to peddle "fear" and get the public sheep to follow along.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by classicman

Sounds like the D's learned very well from the R's how to peddle "fear" and get the public sheep to follow along.

WOW! you hit the nail on the head. Where are all the liberal sheepel? Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.....

[classicman]

Just keep on giving all that money away sugar.

[sugarpop]

Funny. A republican from SC said on the news last night (in a conversation about Gov. Sanders) that they had to fight him on the stimulus. He (sanders) didn't want to take the money, but if they did take it, he wanted to use it to pay down the debt, NOT to SAVE the jobs of teachers and police, etc., which ultimately they used it to save many jobs of people who otherwise would have been laid off. And many other politicians have said the exact same thing. If they hadn't had access to that money, more jobs would have been lost.

See, I believe this is where we are at fault with regard to capitalism. We don't have a problem with the small percentage of people earning the majority of the money, even though good jobs are more scarce and pay significantly less than they used to. And we are always concerned about growth. We MUST grow the economy. How about creating a truly sustainable economy? It is unsustainable to keep allowing the top to grow astronomically while everything else stagnates, especially since the population is also growing, which is also unsustainable. It is more sustainable to have a more level playing field, where there are plenty of jobs that pay well enough so everyone can afford to live comfortably. (I did not say lavishly, I said comfortably.) It is better for everyone if NO ONE has all the concentrated wealth to the extent a small percentage do now.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by sugarpop

It is unsustainable to keep allowing the top to grow astronomically while everything else stagnates, especially since the population is also growing, which is also unsustainable. It is more sustainable to have a more level playing field, where there are plenty of jobs that pay well enough so everyone can afford to live comfortably. (I did not say lavishly, I said comfortably.) It is better for everyone if NO ONE has all the concentrated wealth to the extent a small percentage do now.

[TheMercenary]

..

[sugarpop]

So... what, are you actually agreeing with me?

[TheMercenary]

Who says the Feds aren't in the business of taking over private industry?

WASHINGTON — The House approved a spending bill on Thursday that would impede efforts by General Motors and Chrysler to close thousands of their dealerships.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/business/17autos.html

[classicman]

Watchdog: Gov't may have overpaid to bail out AIG

Officials handling the multibillion dollar bailout of insurance giant American International Group Inc. mismanaged an initial rescue attempt and may have overpaid other banks to wind down AIG's business relationships, a government watchdog says.
lationships, a government watchdog says.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York — headed at the time by now-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner — paid AIG's business partners full face value for securities so they would cancel insurance contracts AIG had written in order to ease the firm's liquidity crunch. But at least one of those partner banks offered to canceled the contracts for less, according to a report Monday from Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for the $700 billion financial bailout Congress approved last October.

That means officials may have spent billions more than necessary to cancel debt insurance contracts with banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and others, the report says.

The New York Fed also weakened its bargaining position by refusing to threaten that AIG would go bankrupt after an initial $85 billion bailout proved too small to save the firm, the report says. Furthermore, negotiators led by Geithner told the banks that any concessions would be purely voluntary, the report says.

The result, the report says, was a weak negotiating strategy with little chance of success in obtaining concessions from the banks. It says the initial bailout "was done with almost no independent consideration of the terms of the transaction or the impact that those terms might have on the future of AIG."

As president of the New York Fed, Geithner signed off on many key decisions concerning AIG's bailouts — including the move to pay in full for securities held by other banks, the report says. Also involved were officials from Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

The report says Geithner denied that officials intended to give other banks a "backdoor bailout." Yet it says decisions Geithner approved — "indeed, the very design" of AIG's rescue — meant that billions of taxpayer dollars were "funneled inexorably and directly" to other banks.

It acknowledges that officials had good reasons to save AIG, and were appropriately reluctant to break contracts the company had with other companies. But it says those decisions "came with a cost — they led directly to a negotiating strategy that even ... Geithner acknowledged had little likelihood of success."

How easy is it to hide a few million bucks in a transaction this large. I wonder where all this money actually went.
Oh, and good job there Timmy. . . Not.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by classicman

Watchdog: Gov't may have overpaid to bail out AIG



How easy is it to hide a few million bucks in a transaction this large. I wonder where all this money actually went.
Oh, and good job there Timmy. . . Not.

Yay for bailing out bankers! You'd hate to see society leveled a bit due to market forces.

[SamIam]

Private equity firms buy undervalued or underappreciated companies, impose short-term improvements and sell them for a fast profit. Some of the companies they've bought include Hertz, La Quinta, Dunkin Donuts, and Toys R Us. Josh Kosman, a private equity expert, says that the way the firms have been able to buy these businesses — through leveraged buyouts — means the majority of the money for the buyout has come from loans that the firms dump on the company they're supposedly fixing.

Now burdened with debt, many of those companies owned by private equity firms are in danger of defaulting. In a new book, Kosman writes that it's likely half of the 3,188 American companies bought by private equity firms between 2000 and 2008 could collapse. His book is called The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Will Cause the Next Great Credit Crisis.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=120391729

Here is a highly interesting and spooky story from NPR.

~snip

In December 2008, the Boston Consulting Group, which advises PE firms, predicted that almost 50 percent of PE-owned companies would probably default on their debt by the end of 2011. It also believed there would be significant restructuring at these companies leading to massive cost cuts and difficult layoffs.
A rain of defaults is already starting. From January 1 through October 31, 2009, 175 American companies defaulted on their debt. That is almost double the number for all of 2008. Half of those companies have been involved in transactions with PE firms at some point in their corporate life, according to the Standard & Poor's rating agency.

If this analyst is correct today’s economy could look like a picnic by comparison with what's coming down the road.

[tw]

Originally Posted by SamIam

Here is a highly interesting and spooky story from NPR.

"Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." And then the bills come due four and ten years later. We must still pay for "Mission Accomplished". GM is still dumping more expenses on the American public having used GMAC and 0 percent financing to maintain fictional profits. GMAC will now go to the government for what - maybe another $5billion? Because wackos all but protected bin Laden and handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban, we will now spend $1million per soldier per year to refight the entire Afghan war.

We have yet to see many of the debts incurred over the previous ten years. Do not for one minute think the stock market proves a recession is over. The crash in 1929 resulted in job losses mostly in 1933. It takes that long for money games and 'welfare to the rich' to appear as expenses.

Some 15 million Americans are not sure if or where their next meal will come from. One in six Americans is now living in poverty levels. The average American income has dropped 2% in the past eight years. This is not a time to believe things are getting better. We were warned by moderates and economists (using history from some maybe 13 other recessions) that we will be paying for these problems for the next 10 years. We have not yet begun to sell off America to pay our debts.

Most read here in 2005 that a severe housing crisis was pending. When did it finally arrive? 2008. It is difficult to say when or how severe the resulting economic crisis may happen. But we know from history that it is not yet over.

An outside chance says things will not get worse. But nobody has any logical reason to believe so especially due to overt financial mismanagement throughout the 2000s. Any responsible person should be prepared for what could get very bad - for the same reason that a real estate crisis apparent in 2005 finally appeared in 2008.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Griff

Yay for bailing out bankers! You'd hate to see society leveled a bit due to market forces.

If we would have allowed that to happen the weak ones would have just filed for bankruptcy or outright failed. That would be true leveling.