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Ted King wrote:
You know, I had a feeling I should have added a comment to the OP. The issue I was raising was not whether or not the bailout was a good idea (I think it was necessary to bail them out to avoid a severe world wide economic depression - but the way it was done let the bad actors off without meaningful consequences); the issue I meant to raise was that Bush evidently didn't have a clue what he was agreeing to when he signed off on the program. I mean, the guy had been president for almost 8 years and approved a program for $700 billion and didn't know what he was approving. That inept thinking showed itself over and over again - Iraq, Katrina, Justice Department scandal, etc. etc. This forum is pretty much a free-for-all so if you all want to use this thread to hash over the merits of the bailout, that is, of course, fine, but I just want to clarify that that wasn't the issue I intended to raise.
I think that for most of us you were preaching to the choir. An interesting OP but few of us had anything to add to it but Amen.
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$tevie wrote:
You can't keep the banking system from collapsing by giving someone $4500 for their old car.
I wasn't referring to saving the banking system when I mentioned cash for clunkers. I was referring to programs that helped the general public.
The banking system didn't need saving. Some small banks needed saving. They weren't aided. Many collapsed. The bailout was a tremendous fraud upon the people of the United States.
The banking system needs reform and oversight. Neither of which came from the bailout. Neither of which are forthcoming from Congress.
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Doc wrote:
[quote=$tevie]
You can't keep the banking system from collapsing by giving someone $4500 for their old car.
I wasn't referring to saving the banking system when I mentioned cash for clunkers. I was referring to programs that helped the general public.
The banking system didn't need saving. Some small banks needed saving. They weren't aided. Many collapsed. The bailout was a tremendous fraud upon the people of the United States.
The banking system needs reform and oversight. Neither of which came from the bailout. Neither of which are forthcoming from Congress.
What is your defininition of "small banks?" I have talked with a few local bank people and business is fine, even good. They have seen a few foreclosures but nothing on the scale of the large institutions - not even close. They have had a few bad commercial loans and the housing market (construction loans) is not turning around as quickly as they would prefer, but overall small banks are doing fairly well. Again, the definition of a "small bank" is the determinant.
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Call Wachovia and the recording says they are still working out the details of home ownership program. Yeah, right.
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Maybe this is semantics, but I don't see how Bush can be seen as "incompetent". He was in many ways very effective, and he steamrolled the democratic oppostion for most of his presidency; successfully advancing his agenda and his policies. I don't see how that is "incompetence". It is much simpler and more accurate to say he was "wrong".
But not about the bailout. His administration was wrong, and possibly incompetent, in their oversight and regulation of the financial industry in the years leading up to last fall. But they were blinded by idealogy to what should have been increasingly obvious. But once we got to last fall and the bailout, there really was no other choice and little time or opportunity to evaluate the options.
The most telling explanation of how they came up with the bailout plan was that they needed some "really big" and they needed it immediately. In large part, this was a confidence game: they needed the financial industry to believe that they were going to do something, and what they were going to do would work. Whether or not it was the right option, or we could have done other things, is something that economists can study for years. But they did avert an economic collapse, and they have to get some credit for that (as well as the blame for the recession, and the deficits, and the massive increase in the federal government that has or will result).
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>>His administration was wrong, and possibly incompetent, in their oversight and regulation of the financial industry in the years leading up to last fall.
clinton was no better.
(forum conservatives - take not of this post!)
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mrbigstuff wrote:
What is your defininition of "small banks?"
Any one that didn't have the friends or lobbying money to cozy up to the fed for TARP funds. Whether they were playing the same games as the big boys or not.
http://blogs.wsj.com/photojournal/2009/0...upporters/
Read this and tell me again how healthy the banking industry is after the bailout. I could use a good laugh.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/fdics-p...2009-08-27
BTW: Here's a nice piece on the efficacy of the bailouts:
http://www.usnews.com/money/blogs/flowch...etter.html
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michaelb wrote:
Maybe this is semantics, but I don't see how Bush can be seen as "incompetent". He was in many ways very effective, and he steamrolled the democratic oppostion for most of his presidency; successfully advancing his agenda and his policies. I don't see how that is "incompetence". It is much simpler and more accurate to say he was "wrong".
That's a fair point. I probably should have said he was mostly incompetent in his governance, but he certainly did manage to politically leverage 9/11 effectively against the Democrats.
michaelb wrote: But not about the bailout. His administration was wrong, and possibly incompetent, in their oversight and regulation of the financial industry in the years leading up to last fall. But they were blinded by idealogy to what should have been increasingly obvious. But once we got to last fall and the bailout, there really was no other choice and little time or opportunity to evaluate the options.
I wasn't saying that he showed incompetence because he decided to do some kind of a bailout, but the fact that he thought he was signing off on a program where they would "buy low and sell high" when that wasn't what the program would do showed a lot of incompetence given his 8 years as president and that it involved a really, really huge sum of money (enough to pay for a medical reform public option for several years).
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billb wrote:
hearsay and out of context quotes changes my mind
we should allow it in court, too.
From the dictionary:
hearsay: "1. unverified, unofficial information gained or acquired from another and not part of one's direct knowledge"
What the speechwriter wrote in the article wasn't hearsay because it was what he, himself saw and heard - it was a report of his direct knowledge. I gave a link to the whole article from which I pulled the quote in the OP. In what way was this "out of context"? And last, "court"? Now there's something that is a totally different context from what we usually use to assess quality of governance.
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Doc wrote:
[quote=mrbigstuff]
What is your defininition of "small banks?"
Any one that didn't have the friends or lobbying money to cozy up to the fed for TARP funds. Whether they were playing the same games as the big boys or not.
http://blogs.wsj.com/photojournal/2009/0...upporters/
that is a great photojournalist piece but says little about the overall industry.
again, what is your definition of a small bank?
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