Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Bailout Blues
I'm still not entirely sure I'm for this or against this. At first, and for that matter second glance, it seems something to benefit only the well-to-do. Even the addition of the savings insurance upgrade seems of minimal benefit to most. I can't say I have many friends who are too concerned that the insured savings limit is only $100,000. To be honest, I'm not sure too many of my friends would be overly put out with a $10,000 bank savings limit.
I work in a pretty well-paying job and there's folks I work with who have serious difficulties coming up with $500 for emergencies. So the bank saving insurance increase to $200,000 isn't too impressive. While I understand (sort of) that credit is the lifeblood of our economy, I also thought that credit is the root of the problem of our economy. Just how long do people figure they can keep buying stuff without the money to pay for it. And yes, I am a financial idiot so this bailout probably makes sense to someone who has the big bucks.
I'm also a little curious as to what happens to all these foreclosed properties from these busted mortgages the government will be buying. I did hear the government will be selling them off to recover the money. Why do I feel they'll be selling them off in big chunks. Say, tens of millions of dollars worth at a time. And guess who won't be able to get in on any of that. If you take the $700 trillion and divide it by $10 million (I pulled this value out of thin air - like the government did with $700 trillion), you end up with 70,000 chunks. What I can see is someone like Buffet or Icahn coming up with a financial offer wrapped all in legalese that gives them the $700 trillion of foreclosed properties for about one hundred-fourteen dollars and eighty-nine cents in cash. Which they will then sell off with easy-to-pay financing through themselves to those of us who lost the properties in the first place - making even more money for themselves.
And on a note that may or may not be related to this mess, the Chinese just successfully landed a manned space mission that included a space walk. We, the USofA, has just delayed its almost defunct space shuttle mission to rehab the Hubble Telescope before we discontinue the shuttle - after which we will be beholding to the Russians to get our folks up and also back from the International Space Station.
And did you know that 46% of Sanlu (the Chinese company poisoning milk products) is owned by a New Zealand company?
Labels: government, scams
