9/23/2008

Just About All I Have Left To Say On The Subject

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 8:18 am

I think I’ve exhausted my meager repertoire of pithy observations as regards the whole investment bank bailout thing. I wasn’t anything like an expert on the subject to begin with, and delving deeper into it, while possibly increasing my understanding, has also increased my frustration and bewilderment.

So into the knacker it goes, at least for the moment. Hopefully I can fill the space currently occupied by this stuff with something more productive….something like, say, Mirror’s Edge would do nicely. 😉

However, I do have just one more observation to make, which came to me yesterday evening while listening to—quel surprise—Marketplace.

I’ve already mentioned in a previous post that, should no other benefit to the American taxpayer be derived from this now-projected-to-be-$700-billion bailout (a number that would, just as an aside, pay off all of the approximately 1.4 million mortgages in foreclosure, assuming each of those loans owed an average of $500,000….and that’s just a flat-out buyout, without even renegotiating the terms), we may at least possibly expect that having the US government in charge of a controlling share of these formerly august institutions might go some way toward offering a sort of meta-regulation that they have not up to this point had to bear. On the other hand, I’m not so thrilled with the idea of concentrating that much extra power in the hands of the Treasury, even less so with the concept of doling out the dough without some serious, mast-lash-quality strings attached, as the Repus would seem to prefer.

Yesterday another potential benefit came to mind.

It would be nice to think that this whole imbroglio might finally and forever quash the notion that Social Security should be put in the hands of individual investors and the private sector. Dear God, let’s hope so. Almost be worth the 700 bill if it did.

Of course, by the time we finally finish infusing life-giving capital into Wall Street and life-taking money into Baghdad, there’s not likely going to be much left over for Social Security anyway. Thank goodness we’ve got our IRAs! Oh wait, right. 🙁


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