Archive for the 'Banking' Category
The Bush Administration’s proposed $700 billion Wall Street Bail Out proposal is a collosal mistake for the US economy and the American people no matter what restrictions and limitations Congress is able to impose on a power-hungry Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
This “rescue plan” forces taxpayers to reward destructive and negligent business practices and does not address the ruptures in the foundation of the US financial system: deregulation of banks and financial firms, the overturn of the Glass-Steagal Act and a pronounced crony corporate business model which espouses a lack of transparency, limited share-holder input, misleading sales tactics and irresponsible lending.
If Congress actually cared “protecting the taxpayer” then lawmakers would attack the root of the current problem: declining home values and criminal mortgage rates.
Why not use $700 billion dollars to help homeowners keep their homes by purchasing foreclosed homes and offering affordable and reasonable mortgages? It could be a program similar to the Federal Student Loan program which gives millions of Americans the opportunity to pursue a higher education at affordable rates. It doesn’t take a MBA or PHD in economics to figure this out.
A healthy Main Street leads to a healthy Wall Street, but not necessarily the other way around.
Stop the Socialist Spendathon
Try pro-market, pro-growth solutions instead.
By Deroy Murdock
It is beyond irritating to watch President Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gift-wrap their $700-billion early Christmas present for financially irresponsible bankers and the overleveraged borrowers who love them. These “three wise men” consider theirs the only method to stop the turmoil roiling trading desks from Gotham to Tokyo.
“Action by the Congress is urgently required to stabilize the situation and avert what otherwise could be very serious consequences for our financial markets and for our economy,” Bernanke told the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday.
But this mother of all government interventions is unlike a long, cold hypodermic needle in the belly: an inescapable misery, but preferable to death by rabies. There actually are desirable alternatives to building socialism and saddling every American man, woman, and child with another $2,300 in unjustified federal spending.
One option is to instruct the geniuses from Fannie Mae to Wall Street to deal with it. They made this mess; they should mop it up. Cut back, sell assets, develop fresh services, or get new jobs. Absent a federal bailout, Lehman Brothers sold parts of itself to Barclay’s Bank. Facing Uncle Sam’s cold shoulder, Merrill Lynch ran into the loving arms of Bank of America. Merrill’s customers will survive, and its employees will work for B of A or seek their fortunes elsewhere.
It may take time and tightened belts, but padlocking Washington’s bailout window will offer a generation of “masters of the universe” lessons that America’s Mr. Rogers-in-Chief cannot teach: Keep your winnings, but own your losses. If you fall on your face, especially after dancing drunk on the roof, Uncle Sam may empathize, but he no longer will rush in to swaddle you in silk sheets and place your bruised head on pillows stuffed with crisp $100 bills.
Other options exist, of course — and while they lack the bracing appeal of this sort of financial Darwinism, they remain far more attractive than our current policy of “survival of the fattest.”
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas) chairs the Republican Study Committee, the congressional caucus of idea-driven, free-market stalwarts. These practicing Reaganites seem appalled to watch their GOP president morph before their eyes from GWB to LBJ to FDR. At a Capitol Hill press conference at high noon on Tuesday, Hensarling and a dozen RSC members expressed deep misgivings about Bush’s $700-billion baby. Preferring to drown it in the bathwater, Hensarling and his band of true believers rejected Bush’s collectivism and offered their own proposals for escaping this rubble — and returning America to a path of robust growth:
Give the capital-gains tax a two-year vacation. “Suspending capital gains taxes would bring as much as a trillion dollars of capital sitting on the sidelines back into the market,” Hensarling predicts. Also, as the Tax Foundation proposes, cutting America’s 35-percent corporate tax — the industrialized world’s second highest, after Japan’s — would boost U.S. global competitiveness. Since equity prices partially reflect long-term after-tax profits, lowering corporate levies should buoy stock markets.
Denationalize, then privatize Fannie and Freddie. “These troubled financial Frankensteins — created in a government laboratory — are not creatures of the free enterprise system,” Hensarling said. “We must ultimately take their monopoly powers away and return them to the marketplace.” Why not array Fannie’s and Freddie’s loans according to mortgage holders’ surnames? They then could be divided alphabetically into 26 units and auctioned off.
Waive “mark-to-market” accounting. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s John Berlau argues, when distressed mortgage-backed securities sell at bargain-basement prices, unhelpful new bookkeeping regulations require that similar instruments elsewhere — including viable loans — be valued at equally low prices. This needlessly stains balance sheets.
Strengthen the dollar. Bernanke should boost U.S. currency, not pose as America’s uber-stock broker. A strong dollar lowers inflation, cheapens oil, and soothes world markets.
Bush’s bailout bonanza began with $29 billion for Bear Sterns. Then came the taxpayer-financed purchase of an 80-percent stake in AIG. And while the public and press gaped open-mouthed at the $700 billion request to rescue the financial-services sector, Washington quietly passed $25 billion to the auto industry. Doubtless, credit-card companies now await their slab of bacon. This cavalcade of giveaways and takeovers monumentally betrays the Republican Party’s most sacred tenets.
Even worse, Bush’s hyper-statism offers nothing imaginative. It takes brains to generate interesting ideas like Hensarling & Co.’s. It takes mere muscle to nationalize companies and toss handfuls of cash into the air. Just ask Eva Peron.
— New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution.
A former senior Federal Reserve official, Vincent Reinhart, told The Wall Street Journal that the Fed’s bailout of Bear Stearns is the:
This shouldn’t be shocking. Anyone with a sense of history can predict how this failure of policy is going to produce disastrous results. It was a slap in the face to free markets and takes bad lenders off the hook.
The bankruptcy of Bear Stearns would have been a great lesson for Wall Street. But eventually the Fed’s band-aide will fall off. Unfortunately, the wound is going to be worse.
As some got super-duper-to-the-extreme-max richy-rich this week by hedging bets on our collective demise, thousands of cogs expect to be laid off next week thanks to Citigroup, Merrill Lynch & Co and Wachovia bungling.
Expect the trickle over and down effect in the coming months. You better make appointments with your dentist, doctor, psychiatrist and all other necessary practitioners while you still have coverage.
Down. Despite the nosedive the US economy seems to be taking, Wall Street Hedge Fund kings are raking in billions. The thing is that the only other time in the history of the United States in which there was such dramatic economic inequality was in 1928. … 1928: the year before the stock market crash. Which was followed by the Great Depression. You follow? Uh-huh.
Now, everyone has been talking about this recession we are in - or about to be in - but what no one seems to want to talk about is the glaring inequality of the distribution of wealth in the United States. As the super-rich get super-duper-rich, the poor are getting desperately poor and the middle class is joining the bread line.
A depression isn’t inevitable, but something drastic has to change. And it’s going to take more than government intervention, it’s going to take an awakening of the American conscious.
The announcement of Wachovia’s “surprise” losses today were no surprise to me. A simple awareness of Wachovia’s super-rapid warp-speed expansion across the country should clue any sentient being into the fact that Wachovia is expanding too fast, in saturated well-served markets, in a period of economic uncertainty and decline. Hel-lo! Who’s running Wachovia anyway???? Whomever has been overseeing Wachovia’s overzealous expansion is the culprit. … Maybe I should get my mba.
