Cash For Everyone Else, But Not The Sick

From Acerbic Politics

Oh, The Poor, Poor Bankers!

Gawker reports on an article in the Wall Street Journal...

When administration officials began calling them to talk about the next phase of the bailout, the bankers turned the tables. They used the calls to lobby against the antibonus legislation...

The banks' message: If you want our help to get credit flowing again to consumers and businesses, stop the rush to penalize our bonuses.

And Gawker adds to the argument, rather sarcastically...

If the president wants bankers to accept the billions of taxpayer dollars they need, he's going to have to accept their outrageous demands, like bonuses forever. Wait, what?

American bankers are sitting on trillions of dollars in troubled mortgage securities they can't sell without admitting their banks are nearly worthless. So they need billions of fresh dollars from the government.

But the government has been trying to take away their precious bonuses, as if they're not excellent at running banks. So the bankers are being dicks, to the president.

McCain Is Asked About HIS Bailout Plan

From Acerbic Politics

Why Are We Bailing Out AIG?

Mostly because it is one of the world's largest insurance companies and it has insured many of the banks around the world that are at the heart of the financial crisis. If AIG goes under, it might be the first domino in a long string of failures. Here's some more interesting stuff on the bailout from Gawker (click the link to read more).

Where are insurance giant AIG's bailout billions really going? The White House doesn't want to tell us. But the Wall Street Journal, bless its Rupert Murdoch-owned heart, found out anyway: Foreign banks, lots of them!

The Federal Reserve began propping up AIG last September; a recent $30 billion infusion has brought the total bill to $173 billion. The government now owns 80 percent of the many-tentacled insurer, meaning that taxpayers are essentially on the hook for its liabilities. And AIG has spent roughly $50 billion fulfilling contracts it issued to banks to guarantee the value of various derivatives. Those complex financial bets went disastrously wrong as first the mortgage business and then the entire stock market imploded. U.S. legislators have been asking administration officials for names all week after the Treasury . They refused. But the WSJ got them:

Goldman Sachs
Deutsche Bank
Merrill Lynch
Société Générale
Calyon
Barclays
Rabobank
Danske
HSBC
Royal Bank of Scotland
Banco Santander
Morgan Stanley
Wachovia
Bank of America
Lloyds Banking Group

Ah yes, Rabobank, that pillar of the American economy.

Bailout/Stimulus Cartoons

While I'm At It...

...here's another sickening story about the economy.

The Obama administration is trying to curtail some of the excesses of the banks and businesses that the TARP money and stimulus money has gone to. As you must be aware, nothing upsets the taxpayers more than having their money bailout a bank only to have them pay out billions of dollars in bonuses to the officers who created the deficits in the first place. Well, the bankers are having none of that!

From the New York Times...

Financial institutions that are getting government bailout funds have been told to put off evictions and modify mortgages for distressed homeowners. They must let shareholders vote on executive pay packages. They must slash dividends, cancel employee training and morale-building exercises, and withdraw job offers to foreign citizens.

As public outrage swells over the rapidly growing cost of bailing out financial institutions, the Obama administration and lawmakers are attaching more and more strings to rescue funds.

The conditions are necessary to prevent Wall Street executives from paying lavish bonuses and buying corporate jets, some experts say, but others say the conditions go beyond protecting taxpayers and border on social engineering.

Some bankers say the conditions have become so onerous that they want to return the bailout money. The list includes small banks like the TCF Financial Corporation of Wayzata, Minn., and Iberia Bank of Lafayette, La., as well as giants like Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo.

Hmph. I guess they didn't need the money all that badly after all. I hope they give it back quickly - plus interest.

This Recession is Serious

I don't know if the majority of Republicans understand the depth of this recession - it doesn't seem so since they are so diametrically opposed to the stimulus, the bailouts and the financial rescue of the middle class. I read enough financial news to know and understand that there is still a very real chance that the world economy could collapse into a complete depression. Banks in Europe are even worse off than those in the US and if Europe goes under, our economy would collapse right behind them. Check out the chart below.

From Acerbic Politics

Are Taxpayer Dollars Really Funding the Bailouts and Stimulus?

When the conservatives scream about the stress on our taxpayers over the bailout (TARP) and the more recent stimulus, they, once again, are showing off their ignorance. Here's an article, from Motley Fool, on where the money is really coming from.

Taxpayers' rage over bailouts, TARPs, and daring housing rescue plans continues unabated. The nation's ire seems largely centered on the idea that our tax dollars are directly rescuing Wall Street banks like Citigroup (NYSE: C) and Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) and subsidizing underwater homeowners.

Rabble rabble rabble
The problem with this argument is that our tax dollars have already been spoken for, and have been for quite some time. According to The Heritage Foundation, from 1965 to 2007, government tax revenues grew $1.9 trillion, but spending rose $2.1 trillion, resulting in average annual deficits of $167.8 billion on an inflation-adjusted basis. So even before the bailouts began, formal income tax dollars alone didn't fully pay for the government's spending. It's somewhat fascinating that it's taken us taxpayers some forty years to finally demand fiscal responsibility in Washington.

Read more - and find out where the money is really coming from - by clicking here. Hint - as investors have bailed out of the stock market to the tune of a trillion dollars, they've had to put that money somewhere.

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Wanda Sykes (She's No Economist) On The Bailout

But she does make some sense...

Paul Krugman Discusses the Stimulus Package

Barney Frank On The Biggest Spending Bill

Countdown: Barney Frank on the Bailout

Is This Right?

I lost track of the source of this chart (and I find a lot of stuff loose on the Usenet so I may never have had the source), but it is probably accurate. However, my limited knowledge of the economics of the bailout tells me that these figures for the economic crisis include monies not actually spent, but guarantees given by the Federal Reserve System to failing banks and financial institutions.

The "Wall Street Bailout" figures also, most-likely, do not include anticipated returns from loans that the government has made.

My final comment: Although the chart does not indicate the basis used for all of the monetary amounts, one would have to assume that any organization sophisticated enough to put this together also used constant dollar amounts, thus accounting for inflation.

Makes Sense To Me

I like what the Obama Administration is doing. So many of their new rules seem designed to clean up government and I like it a lot.

From TPM...

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, in his first full day on the job, announced new rules Tuesday to limit special-interest influence on the government's $700 billion financial rescue program.

The new rules are designed to crack down on lobbyist influence over the rescue program and make sure that political clout in not a factor in awarding rescue money.

Obama administration officials said they go farther than the lobbying rules imposed by the Bush administration and are designed to ensure that bailout money is distributed with the goal of promoting the health and stability of the financial system.

via MoJo

More Outrage

Time for my daily dose of outrage....

A few days ago under the title of Great Words, I posted a quote from Dr. Henry Kissinger that explained that when the gap between the richest Americans and the poorest (even middle class) Americans becomes too great, there will be a political rebellion, The point of such a rebellion, in my interpretation of the words, will be to bring the wealthy back closer to the center.

The wealthy have used their greed to bilk the American middle class out of billions. While they frolic in the luxury of their deep, thick piles of cash, earned by trashing our economic system, the rest of us pay the price. In my opinion, the election of a liberal Democrat to the presidency reflects that rebellion.

Take a look at this crap, posted by Uncle Bob on Daily Kos...

The Financial Times reported that Merrill Lynch accelerated its normal time schedule for awarding bonuses and distributed $ 4 billion dollars on Dec 29, just 3 days before its takeover by Bank of America. At the same time Merrill posted $15 billion in losses for the fourth quarter. The total compensation for Merrill Lynch employees in 2008 was $15 billion.

That’s way more than just an outsized sense of entitlement, that’s flat-out stealing. And the money for this comes from, you guessed it, the US government. The Bank of America was prepared to back out of the deal once the size of the Merrill Lynch loss became apparent. The deal was completed only after guarantees of government money by the US Treasury.

Bailout Banks Cheating Us?

I guess there's something about me that likes to be outraged at least once or twice a day. Following is a clip from the Washington Post that irritates the daylights out of me - and I'm one who favors bailing out the banks.

Most of America's largest publicly traded corporations -- including several that are receiving billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers to finance their recovery -- have set up offshore operations that could help them avoid paying U.S. taxes on their profits, a government study released yesterday found.

American International Group, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley are among the companies that are getting bailed out by U.S. taxpayers while having subsidiaries in locations where they can avoid paying U.S. taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office.

You've Hearad About TARP? There's More.

Yes, Congress and the President approved TARP to the tune of $700 Billion, but there's more - much more - going on in the matter of bailing out failed financial institutions. In particular, without specific authorization, the Fderal Reserve Bank (sometimes referred to as just The Fed), has loaned out $1.2 trillion. Here's a video in which Congressman Alan Grayson Grills Fed Vice Chair Donald Kohn. It's sort of sickening.

TARP Cartoon

Have you got YOUR bailout yet? Me neither.

Bailout Cartoon

Financial bailouts seem to be available for the rich, why not make them accessible for everyone via the local ATM machine? It works for me - I'm heading down to the bank today!

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