Poll: How do DUers want the financial crisis to be handled - bailout or no bailout?

[Liberal_in_LA]

Poll question: Poll: How do DUers want the financial crisis to be handled - bailout or no bailout?

Poll: How do DUers want the financial crisis to be handled - bailout or no bailout?

:*

[Robert Oak]

1. got another poll

Over on The Economic Populist, Do you believe the bail out is use of the Shock Doctrine?

http://www.economicpopulist.org/?q=content/do-you-believe-bail-out-simply-corporate-takeover-united-states-shock-doctrine-method

[On the Road]

5. Actually, a More Appropriate Comparison

would be that NOT attempting some sort bailout would be an application of the shock doctrine.

The bailout plan, and all the interventions so far, are designed to REDUCE the risk of a crash in assets which would allow the rich to buy them up cheap. That's what the vultures are salivating about.

[fla nocount]

11. Damn, 94% yes. n/t

[MrSlayer]

2. I don't believe there is a financial crises.

This all seems to be a grand scale con to me. So, no bailout.

[curious one]

3. I don't believe there is a crisis. This is a scam like the yellow cake scam.

[depakid]

4. Seems to me that there are systemic problems

that require systemic solutions that aren't easily framed in terms like "bailouts."

[JDPriestly]

6. Democrats should offering distressed homeowners 99-year leases

at low interest rates. If the homeowners sell their homes they should not get a tax deduction on the capital gains. They should have to pay all the tax on the gain. Also the house payments should go to the U.S. government each month to repay the loans. Banks should be allowed to buy the 99-year mortgages if they wish to, but I doubt they will. That will calm the markets down, keep people in their homes, protect neighborhoods from deterioration and permit investors to have confidence in the overall economy.

In addition, we need a huge national investment program that develops new technologies including energy technologies and provides good jobs to America's highly competent work force.

[tama]

7. In Cuba

housing is a right, not a commodity. That said, Cuba has IIRC the highest level of home ownership in the world.

http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/education/oustanding_student_papers/kapur_smith_cuba_02.pdf

[JDPriestly]

15. Ownership?

You mean Cuba is the "ownership" society? I can't believe this. It does not fit with what I have heard from people who lived in Cuba in the past 10 years.

[tama]

19. Yup, ownership.

Read the article.

[riverdeep]

8. The crisis is real, what it will take to solve it, that's another question.

People whose whole life has been spent in economics, when it comes right down to it, cannot tell you what will happen. But banks already limited or stopped lending to each other. When stuff like that happens, it's real. I believe that our intervention monetarily is probably needed at this point, but I'm having trouble with the $700 billion figure. Chuck Schumer actually had a pretty good question. He asked why do you need all this money at once? Why can't we just commit $150 billion now, and allocate more as necessary? The response was that the market won't respond confidently if it's not the whole amount.

Note that it would take about $200 billion total to outright buy out the bad mortgages of homeowners. Where's the rest of this coming from?

[Greyhound]

12. Credit Default Swaps account for a huge part of their "bad calls" and are

a principle source of the other half trillion. Basically another formerly illegal transaction that Gramm & Co. gave us.

[JDPriestly]

16. Bail out the homeowners. Buy the bad loans from the banks

and give the homeowners 99-year (maximum) mortgages at low interest rates on their properties. The banks are liquid because they are paid off. Taxpayers are reimbursed as homeowners make low monthly payments on their debts. The loans to the homeowners would come with strings attached. For example, they could sell their loans (and houses) and let the purchaser pay on the loan or they could sell the house or refinance the house for a shorter term but be required to pay the government a good share of any profit made on the house. Most likely, since the houses with sub-prime mortgages are overpriced in terms of the value of today's dollar and were purchased in a market in which houses were considerably more expensive than they would today be valued, the current owners will only be able to sell their 99-year loans, not the houses at current market value.

This plan would mean that banks get full value on their loans now. Homeowners stay in their homes thus stabilizing communities and families hit by the crisis.

My concern is that, in bailing out banks, we let American families, especially children in families that are being foreclosed, and neighborhoods, in which in some cases many houses have already been abandoned and sometimes trashed, in the lurch.

This crisis does not just affect some impersonal financial institutions. It uprooting famlies, destroying scarce housing stock that represents an important investment in our nation and devastating neighborhoods in some areas, especially low income neighborhoods.

Bailing out banks is not enough. Paulson's plan is shortsighted and superficial. It was hatched by egghead mathematicians in the office towers of New York and D.C. It will hurt Main Street really badly.

The toll on families that have to move into the back half of the back bedroom or the basement of a sister or brother's house will be horrendous. Children get lost and sometimes abused when economic crises hit their parents. This is humiliating to parents who worked hard to even be able to qualify for a sub-prime mortgage in a market in which housing prices were unrealistically inflated.

Paulson's plan is cruel. It will bail out Paulson's pals on Wall Street and leave many, many American families out on the streets this winter.

Once you lose your house, it is hard to keep your job and your self-respect. We need a comprehensive economic solution, not this half-baked bail-out plan. Are Paulson and Bernanke human at all? How could they ever sign off on this plan?

[radfringe]

9. are there any other choices?

to bail or not to bail, that is the question. All or nothing? are there other alternatives or variations to either approach?

We do have a big problem, a "solution" that was prepared 2-3 months ago for a bail-out suddenly appears when fear is running high smells fishy. If this bail-out plan was created 2-3 months ago, why wasn't it officially proposed 2-3 months ago - obviously the bushies KNEW that at some point all these companies would collapse and that it would create a crisis. Instead of waiting for the crisis to occur, why weren't there steps taken to PREVENT IT.

Looks like a LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) to me, and smells worse than a barrel of catfish decomposing in the hot Texas sun.

Why is a $700+ billion bail out the only solution? Were any other alternatives/variations explored? Why did the bushies wait until Congress was in the last week of business before adjourning for campaign season when they obviously knew this mess would happen?

GAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

:mad: :grr: :mad: :grr: :mad: :grr: :mad: :grr:

[alcibiades_mystery]

10. Some kind of bail out is necessary

I don't think many of you ever read a bond agreement.

My uncle once told me something very wise. He said that the problem with propaganda is not that you believe everything. It's that it's bound to fail sometimes, and when it does, you don't believe anything. That's what's happening now. Some people on this thread are saying there is no financial crisis, that it's all a plot. Some imbeciles in GD/P seem to think that it is a deliberate plot meant to affect the US election. Let me be clear: if you think that, you are a fucking idiot. There is a major financial meltdown going on, and it's been moving in slow motion for about a year, and it accelerated rapidly about a month ago, and that has to do with various provisions in the bond agreements. It's fucking real, people, and some of you are going to be begging on the goddamn street behind it, probably muttering about some plot you believe in. Now, the Paulson plan is insane, and should be rejected. But something, unfortunately, has to be done, and it involves large quantities of taxpayer money. With any luck, we'll get most of it back. With really good luck, we'll get all of it back, but that's not likely. With no luck, we'll spend a ton and the thing will still collapse, and you'll be begging on the street anyway.

[tkmorris]

13. You're right

I have to admit, I have never had reason to tackle the steep learning curve necessary to understand derivatives, or the intricacies of bond agreements. Thus, when people said a meltdown was imminent unless the government stepped in, I couldn't be sure whether they were telling the truth or not.

So I learned. I do that fast, always have, just never had any reason to CARE about the kind of transactions they are talking about. And when it began to sink in, I started drinking. It's that bad. A lot of these people begging for a bailout have been assholes since the day they learned to cheat at Old Maid, but they aren't lying about how serious the situation is. Some people seem to think this is all about bailing out some rich fat cats who lost all their money gambling on an overheated mortgage market. It isn't. Something does need to be done, or we ALL are going to take it in the shorts. At the same time, I became angry with myself for allowing this much money to change hands, and the entire American economy to be risked, while not bothering to attempt to understand exactly what they were up to. And then, finally, I became angry with them. Seriously AM, how could they not have foreseen this? Bubbles do not go on indefinitely, they always burst. And when this one did, the effect was as predictable as night following the day.

So, what now? The Paulson plan is a non-starter; you cannot simply HAND the treasury the keys to the American taxpayer and let them do whatever they want. So what do we do? Do you have any suggestions?

[HamdenRice]

17. We're on the same page having both struggled through bond agreements

What you wrote the other day was really interesting and I hadn't thought about it -- the cross default problem.

People are screaming that all the mbs is toxic, worthless, toilet paper, etc, and have absolutely no clue what they are talking about.

As I've been trying to point out, there is still immense value in the underlying assets, and a lot of mbs is in default and "worthless" because of stupid, lazy work, like putting too much in one trust leading to pointless cross defaults.

When the problem first started, former Secy O'Neil made a great anology: if there were 10 bottles of water and one was poison would you drink any of them? Now the analogy is: if there is one drop of poison in the well would you drink water from it?

The big question is can we separate the good from the bad, turn it around and will institutions buy it?

Sadly as you point out, people are screaming irrationally because their paranoid fantasy does indeed fit the pattern of what the bushistas have done. In a way, despite being wrong, they're perfectly logical, which makes it harder to explain.

My only thing about what you wrote is that it won't convince anyone to insult them. It takes lots of patient explanation. The other day, I had a few beers and after being called a mole, a shill, a spouter of right wing talking points, a vulture, etc, for trying to explain what was going on, I lost it and just started calling people idiots, so I had to stop posting explanations for a while.

But this shit is real.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

14. Other: I have no goddamn idea.

I'm a reasonably intelligent person with a reasonably good understanding of the economy, and I have no fucking clue what we ought to do about this situation. The scary thing is that I don't believe anybody else does either.

[pnutbutr]

18. give each American

A $2300 check to boost consumer spending. Screw the failed banks and have the government seize all defaulted loans and distribute control of the properties to local governments to auction. The fed will generate tax revenue through increased consumer spending and the local governments will increase revenue from the sale of the properties.