Subscribequite a few saw coming just a few months ago...
Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, as has been the case on far too many occasions in the past number of years, the Senate finds itself today in the position of having to deal with a massive omnibus appropriations bill. ... This is a practice that should never have been started and which, if not discontinued, I fear will gravely diminish the Senate as an institution. Senators are being denied the right to debate and amend appropriations bills, all of which contain billions of taxpayer dollars, and literally thousands of funding issues affecting their constituents. Instead, we are being presented with unamendable omnibus appropriations packages, which contain many, many matters that have not had any Senate consideration at all.At that conference McCain chooses to single out some earmarks, including "the $176,000 for the Reindeer Herders Association? ...$1 million for winter pollack survey in Alaska."
At its core, the current crisis stems from two problems. Regulators, starting with Alan Greenspan, assumed that a real estate bubble couldn’t happen and that Wall Street could largely police itself. And households, struggling with incomes that haven’t kept up with inflation in recent years, said yes when those lightly regulated banks offered them wishful-thinking loans. No bailout can solve either problem.possible solution(s), underlying principals & costs, including: "as an aside - when the banks make their assets transparent (should be a requirement for participation), we will discover if any executives misrepresented their assets and filed false reports with the SEC. That could be prosecuted under Sarbanes-Oxley, and perhaps a few executives spending time in jail might help with the moral hazard issues" :P
Nobody should believe the overblown claims that "free market" ideology is now dead. During boom times it is profitable to preach laissez-faire, because an absentee government allows speculative bubbles to inflate. When those bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance, and it goes dormant while government rides to the rescue. But rest assured: the ideology will come roaring back when the bailouts are done. The massive debt the public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part of a global budget crisis that will be the rationalisation for deep cuts to social programmes, and for a renewed push to privatise what is left of the public sector. We will also be told that our hopes for a green future are too costly.My thirties are going to be awesome.
The Bush administration on Saturday formally proposed to Congress the largest financial bailout in United States history, requesting virtually unfettered sweeping authority for the Treasury to purchase up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets from financial institutions headquartered in the United States.Garbage in, garbage out.
The proposal was stunning for its stark simplicity: less than three pages, it would raise the national debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion. And it would place no restrictions on the administration other than requiring semi-annual reports to Congress, allowing the Treasury to buy and resell mortgage debt as it sees fit.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
Obama appears to have one clear advantage in the conversation: His campaign has been able to bulk up quickly, bringing in an array of major players from the Clinton administration who helped guide the nation through market upheavals, including the crises in Russia, Argentina and Southeast Asia and the collapse of the massive hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. In the past few weeks, an eclectic and largely low-profile team of economic advisers at the Obama campaign headquarters has been practically taken over by the Clinton A-team...I would like a smart president, please, though to give McCain the benefit of the doubt, the top R people are probably busy working for the current administration +/or advising people on the Hill.
"He's terrific on this stuff," Rubin gushed Friday on the return trip from Florida, where he had joined Obama for his emergency economic session. "He starts every meeting the same way, 'Let's try to figure out what's right substantively, then figure out how to handle it.' He asks good questions, really understands these things, the nuance, the distinctions.
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posted by clevershark at 10:58 AM on September 19, 2008 [1 favorite]