Please sign it and pass it along to as many people as you can.
The bailout bill goes before the house tomorrow. They want to take 800 billion taxpayer dollars and give it to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Please.
http://financialpetition.org/

What's your alternative action?

Leave the two mortgage companies that hold a combined 50% of the mortgages in the U.S. go under? Then what?

I hate bailouts as much as anyone, however I don't see much of a choice in this one.

Help me with the math here.

We lend you the money to buy a house

You pay us 3 times the amount that we lent you for that house

We still lose money...

It just don't add up.

No shiat B-run. That is about as good as I have heard it put. Somewhere there is some shady dealing going on with these companies. They want to give you five dollars, collect ten and then ask for fifteen more because they waisted seven on B.S. No accountablity. Somehow I dont think that is how the system was designed to work.

What happens is that the original bank that gives you a mortgage doesn't really care if you can pay it back or not...and since deregulating it, there's no oversight to make sure that only those who can pay back their loans get loans.

They sell the loans to FM/FM, who also don't bother checking to see if the loans they are buying will ever paid back...guess why they don't have to check anymore?

They're not too worried about it...because when the housing bubble bursts and thousands of the loans go into default, they just take the properties...but if that's not enough to get them out of trouble, then they can just rely on their buds in the government to bail them out...

...with TAXPAYER dollars...

...the same buds who deregulated them and caused this problem in the first place.

How much of the profits are spread to the taxpayers when things are good and the loans are being paid off? None, beyond the same taxes we all pay.

It's called Socialism...spread the costs to all of society.

Unfortunately, it's a special kind of Socialism...Corporate Socialism...where the costs are socialized to the taxpayer, but the benefits are kept privately by the corporate entities, and, of course, their deregulating lapdogs that they fund in Congress.

Corporate Socialism (private benefits/socialized costs) goes by another name, too...it's calld fascism.

Fish on...

Todd

This is from a previous diatribe of mine on an earlier thread about this problem:

...it is important to note that (Phil) Gramm got the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (a 262 page document)attached to the already contentious $384 billion budget spending package hammered out at the last minute. No one read it or really knew what was in it (ignorance is no excuse) so it passed as an attachment. Among other things, the bill did the following:

Exempted energy trading from regulatory oversight. As a result, Enron wrecked the California electricty market and cost consumers billions before it collapsed. Approximately eight years before this, Gramm's Wife, Wendy Gramm was Chairperson of the Commodity Futures Trading Commision. She pushed through a rule excluding Enron's energy futures contracts from government oversight. Wendy later joined Enron's board and received anywhere between $915,000 and $1.8 million.

Made Credit Default Swaps unregulated. These are essentially insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event of a default. With no regulation, no one made sure that banks and hedge funds had the assets to cover the losses the CDS's were to guarantee. This was supported by Alan Greenspan and Fed Chairman Larry Summers - a $62 trillion market which is about four times the size of the stock market. If this doesn't scare you, you are beyond reach.

The best punishment for these people would be taking away their money - make them live on a paycheck, do their own grocery shopping, pump their own gas (if they could afford it on their McDonald's salary), etc.

I DO NOT ADVOCATE VIOLENCE - but I wonder what would happen if these people started turning up "expired" - would the system change?

Mikespike
You make it sound as if Gramm put this through on his own and that is not true. Try looking up jim johnson. He put it into action and greased the pockets of those involved with sweet little loan deals that other dont get. He is just as responsible as Gramm. There is plenty of blam to go around here and not just Gramm as you try to make it look. This is a big scandle and goes all through congress and elsewhere such as the corp fat cats.

And STILL the majority here apologize for "their" guy who f*cked the whole thing up and blame the "other" guy who f*cked the whole thing up.

Why must the majority of you contuinue to apologize for and even lube up HALF of those who have been bending you over the barrel the last 30 years?

Party first, country second, huh?

Well, pay the man. You asked for it.

Apologize for Gramm, docspud........defend him. WTF? Does he have to bang your mom and kick your f'n dog to get you to say something bad about him? Or will that just be an opportunity for you to point out a Democrat who banged 3 dude's moms and kicked 7 dogs?

I'm about ready to just withdraw from politics altogether. I can't f'n STAND the whole process any more. It's beyond my ability to tolerate.

I have no apology for Gramm. The peice of shiat deserves what he gets and I will never say he is in the right for what he did. i think the SOB should loose his home for the whole F-ing process...........But there have been so many bitching about Gramm and giving these other peices of crap a pass because they belong to the others guys, their guys campagn. All I said was there are many involved and to try to put this as a rope around McC neck by attaching gramm to him is sticking your head in the sand and avoiding the true depth of what happened. I apologize for none of them.

Well, then accept my apologies for inferring otherwise.

Freddie and Fannie hold 12 trillion worth of paper in this country. That's 3 trillion more than our national debt. This bailout is going to hurt........and it should.

Maybe, just maybe, someone will be held accountable........but I'm not holding my breath.

I am afraid the only people to be held accountable will be each and ever one of us that pay taxes. Shiatty day for america.....We seem to have a lot of them these days.

This is all painful to see. I don't follow the politics of the matters much. I just wait until someone posts something about it, read everything and then bitch about it. If the numbers that are being thrown around here are true then we are screwed. I would say that a recession would be best case scenario. Depression more likely, and a serious crash in the economy the given. Ofcourse, alot of these things are already starting to manifest themselves. Thank god I work for the government.

Nice first post, jerkoff.


This is all a direct result of the banking deregulations of the 90's under the Republican's Contract with America (remember that? It also made us pay $20 each to get into our Nat'l Parks) that was all signed into law by a grinning Bill Clinton.

Considering the two options between bailout and letting them sink, I choose bailout, because the other option isn't an option at all, only economic suicide.

As I see it, there are two parties involved in this mess to begin with.

First you have the borrower that looks at his loan agreement and signs on the dotted line knowing full well he has no ability to pay the mortgage as stipulated when interest rates rise.

Then you have the lender that also knows the same thing.

It seems everybody got caught in the "house-flipping" craze and when the market started spiraling downward with nobody to buy the houses they said WASS (We Are So Screwed).

Now, because politicians would like to blame predatory lenders for people's stupidity we, as taxpayers and people who can actually read a contract, are taking it in the shorts. I would like to see some personal accountability here.

Hey docspud-

Later in that post I clarified that Phil Gramm is not smart enough to do this on his own. However, he has worked RELIGIOUSLY on behalf of the banking and finance entities his entire political career and still does.

This guy helped bankrupt America, OUR country, yours and mine, and he will never suffer for it.

Now selling tickets for "The Great Depression, Part II"

He is a piece of shiat Mike and I hope he goes down for it. The list will be long a distinguished with those involved if this ever gets iorned out. Sadly it probably won't and every tax payer will pay the price for it.

Regardless of party or affiliation, the creators of this mess ought to be held accountable. Taking their homes and letting them try to survive on McDonald's wages is far too good for them. You guys are such bleeding heart liberals! How's bout putting them up in public square pillories and let every American screwed by them come by and carve off a piece of flesh, while it lasts. Make 'em wish they could only be waterboarded.

Vengence done right prevents recidivism.

Sg

Indeed.

They should be lined up on death row right behind computer virus writers.

How many punks do you figure will write computer viruses or bad legislation after the first half-dozen are stoned to death?

Get some rocks!

This whole thing is a glaringly obvious example of what happens when there is no oversight of an important industry.

How many of you will jump right on the bandwagon, however, when the next industry screams bloody murder that they're being regulated right out of business?

Fish on...

Todd

Banker speaking here.

What you have is a number of folks at the big banks that thought they were smarter than everyone else, so they built a house of cards that fell.

Us folks in the little community banks saw what was going on and decided to stay out of it, because when we looked at the entire process, it didn't make sense. Maybe we "lacked the vision" or "weren't smart enough" to understand the products, hedges, and such.

WAMU's stock has lost about 88% of its 52 week high value, and they have lost money, lots of it, and will continue to hemorage more of it. We have lost 21% of our 52 week high stock value, and continue to be very profitable, even with some net interest margin compression. Net interest margin is how community banks make their money, while big banks make it elsewhere. Unfortunately, our stock gets lumped into all bank stocks.

We saw the writing on the wall, just like the tech boom, and every other fad scheme to make money over the past 20 years. Take this into account when the next craze to make money overnight rears its ugly head.

I guess we weren't that dumb afterall, not making a single sub-prime loan. Looks like the smartest guys in the room really weren't.

We are the most regulated industry in the US, and yet people in the big banks still figure out a way to screw it up.