before the bailout was ever approved, I implored barack obama to refuse the strategy

the strategy boiled down to this;

“give more of our assets to the very people who robbed us blind in the hopes that they will not rob us again”

we are morons to approve of ANYTHING that involved money with this administration and his cohorts

This crisis is huge. A lot of people’s lives are at stake. It would have been incredibly irresponsible to not do something…fast. If you know of anything which could have been done without involving money or the Bush Executive branch then I’d be amazed.

It might be entirely possible the entire real reason for the ‘bailout’ was to just buy off blackmailers. But, on the off chance it was actually to buy up bad mortgages and only later got changed to supporting the banking system, I’d like to say it had (and I think continues to have) good reasons to exist — regardless of how badly it might be implemented.

My biggest problem with the bailout (so far), and it might be overblown since I don’t know how well they’ve really implemented it, is that they have only focused on the banking system and we’re still stuck with a lot of bad mortgages. I’d like to see as many different ways as can be thought of to rework those before Obama takes office and has to divert time and energy away from his agenda to clean up the remaining blossoms of the Bush presidency.

Fixing the banking system is good and focusing on it helps us understand better how to re-regulate it and possibly whom to punish. Fixing the core problems of bad mortgages and credit default swaps and over-leveraging are not to be disregarded or underestimated. If they’re not fixed then it won’t matter if we understand the problem since we can only support the banking system for just so long. Eventually you either fix the core problems or you’re just throwing away money.

But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.