The cure is worse than the disease. It will NEVER be a good idea to nationalize any portion of the U.S. economy, but once you have “the Federal Reserve” I guess it was only a matter of time before some President decided to play the hand and take over the banks. And no, I don’t believe this is only “partially nationalized”, nor do I believe it will be “temporary”.
The U.S. government is dramatically escalating its response to the financial crisis by planning to invest $250 billion in the country’s banks, forcing nine of the largest to accept a Treasury stake in what amounts to a partial nationalization.
Partial nationalization? Sorry. They either are or they aren’t, because there’s no “partial” about it.
Doesn’t anyone else have a problem with this? It was what?..a week or so ago we had this major panic attack that the world was coming to an end if we didn’t immediately accept making Hank Paulson the King of Money? And threats of martial law if the Congress didn’t go along? And we were going to buy up “toxic mortgages”, right? So we could get the economy going again. But today, nah, we aren’t doing that now, we’re going to “buy” banks instead now. And we’re going to force them to “participate”.
The Treasury Department’s decision to take equity stakes in banks represents a significant reversal, coming just weeks after Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had opposed the idea. In a momentous meeting yesterday afternoon in Washington, Paulson, flanked by top financial regulators, told the executives of nine leading banks that they needed to participate in the program for the good of the national economy, two industry sources said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Don’t you love that “not authorized to speak publicly”?
I guess what is eating at me is the fact that none of these guys have a clue what they are doing, how we got here, or even whether any of these cures has the slightest chance of doing what they think they will. And not one of them understands the Law of Unintended Consequences, which basically states that once we were only screwed, but now, with the government taking over, we’re screwed five ways to Christmas.
A year ago, if anyone had told you that by the time mid-October 2008 arrived the Dow would be down 35% and a Republican President would be leading the nationaization of U.S. banks, you would have laughed yourself silly and made black helicopter tinfoil hat jokes… it’s not so funny anymore though, is it? What’s it going to look like in a year? And what are we leaving our kids?
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October 15th, 2008 at 8:12 am
BillH,
I’m home on post fiscal year close-out sanity leave and was watching Fox News this morning and one of their experts from Fox Business News called this move by Archduke Paulson what it was, Socialism. We have started down a very slippery slope and should the anointed one win we are probably going to hear more comments like the one that slipped out about wealth distribution to the plumber this week. I am still mad as hell about this betrayal by our political overlords and will do all I can to throw Congressman Simpson into the unemployment line.
Good luck on your next outing to put meat on the table. It looked like you have a pretty good ambush site picked out should a big buck come up the draw.
As I always say on Ms. Malkin’s site now: Welcome to the United Socialist States of America! We’re boned!