How does issuing 700 billion of new treasuries in exchange for assets of questionable value increase liquidity? It doesn’t and they all but said so by saying they “hoped” it would work.

Let’s repeal the bailout and start over.

I am with you on protest.

I am fed up.

We need a new Boston Tea Party, a Montgomery Bus Boycott, a protest that calls attention to the fact that we the people are still relevant. One friend suggested that we start by delaying our mortgage payments by several weeks. As long as it is well publiciced, everyone will know what is happenning. Yet the bankers will freak out. They will see our power and remember that they work for us. Another option is to stop using your credit card for one week. Then if the boycott needs to be extended another week, so be it. Pay with cash. The new system of monitoring payments is not set up to rapidly record non-electronic payments. The bankers will remember the bus boycots and say immediately, lets give them what they want. Remember, we don’t want the system to fail, we just want the system to respect us as participants — not just residual non-pecuinary beneficiaries.

To quote Gary Shandling: “John McCain can’t be saying we are winning the war in Iraq, at the same time we are going bankrupt. That means we are losing because … the planes hitting the buildings was an economic attack. And if we didn’t have to spend X trillion into this war, we might be able to handle the housing issues. Anybody who says that we are winning this war, and the Treasury Secratery says we are two days from being bankrupt, there is a lie going on.”

What I want to know, is if this breaks the credit logjam, can we push to stop the big $700B bailout, as the credit market will have already started breathing via this most recent move and there would be NO REASON to give an additional monies. Let the toxic stuff stay with bad banks.

Anybody got a feeling on this. Angry B

The time to have acted was last year, but that didn’t fit the political plans of the GOP. They were hoping against hope to get through the election before the meltdown came, and they kept stringing things out, but the commercial paper market finally shut down and something had to be done. I think they’d convinced themselves that they could pull off the delay. They’re good at convincing themselves of the most blatant bullshit.

Wall Street played along, keeping the markets up despite a near total lack of anything underpinning them. That there was a lot of worry out there was obvious by the increasingly erratic market swings as sharp sell-offs were followed by sharp up markets. I kept watching it with amazement since it was clear there really was no there there concerning the economic fundamentals.

The only thing the GOP understands is running for office, not governing. As a result, when an actual crisis that requires governing shows up, they don’t have a clue what to do. They waited this time until the ship was not only taking water, but was actually submerged before they agreed to turn on the pumps. It could well be too late to stop a major worldwide financial disaster on the scale of the Great Depression; only time will tell that. But as we watch the world’s financial markets evaporate, we ought to save a bit of the blame for the Democrats, too. They were complicit in not insisting on getting something done earlier. This should have been a major push on their part. But cowardly venality is a bipartisan thing in D.C. these days.

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