Protection money

[melchar]

Anyone else get the feeling that the government is acting like the Mafia**? Bush and Paulson are essentially saying: 'give us a blank check that STARTS at 700 billion but is guaranteed to be more than that - AND we give you no oversight and -maybe- let you make an advisory committee in a few months and if you -don't- then we break your economy'.


[**Okay - acting -worse- than the Mafia: the Mafia is rumored to have a code of honor.]

Comments

[nobarking.livejournal.com]

My dad and I were talking about this -- he spent 30 years as a stockbroker and he's been watching stuff in the US for the last year and a half very carefully, as now that he's retired he just does it for himself and a few friends. He's sold off pretty much all of his US stocks for now.

He said the same thing happened in the 80's with a bunch of investment companies and the US Government didn't wind up losing much money -- they made the money back with them over about 10 years or so. It was 125 million dollars. This is a lot bigger but at least they do sort of know how to take care of it, it just isn't gonna be fixed overnight. :/

He's not saying he saw it coming but he's admitting they were lined up for a fall, as "investors and investment bankers are the greediest people alive while having absolutely no understanding whatsoever of how the real world works". These were his clients.

He's also laughing that the company that bought out his company and forced him into an early retirement wound up being bought out over all this as well, heh.

Blah blah, heh, sorry, we talked about this a bunch today while working on the tractor and blower so it's all still fresh in my mind. The economy's still going to be tanked as badly as the Great Depression -- and Canada isn't going to get off much lighter as we depend so heavily on the US economy, even though we had no similar housing scandal -- but it's not a forever thing, they do have stuff that will eventually fix it without losing everything, but Bush has absolutely nothing to do with it. ;)

Thank goodness for that, really. :x No matter who is president next this will still be handled by uh, trained professionals. Probably the same people who bailed stuff out in the 80's.

[melchar.livejournal.com]

Trained monkeys would do better. [sighs] They'd be more honest. Too bad we can't get your dad involved as a consultant. [It would get him away from you, busy down in Washington DC - and couldn't be any worse than the guys they're using already ^_^.]