New Study Puts Bailouts in Historical Perspective
Hat tip, Rock Creek Free Press
Stowe, VT–Casey Research has analyzed the costs of the government bailouts of the housing crisis, the credit crisis and others and has concluded that the total is $8.5 trillion—more than the cost of all U.S. Wars, the Louisiana Purchase, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan and the NASA Space Program combined.
Paul Craig Roberts
The prospects of a government rescue for the foundering American automakers dwindled Thursday as Democratic Congressional leaders conceded that they would face potentially insurmountable Republican opposition,” reported the New York Times last Friday.
Wow! The entire country is steamed up over the Republicans bailing out a bunch of financial crooks who have paid themselves fortunes in bonuses for destroying America’s pensions.
Why do Democrats want to protect Republicans from further ignominy by not giving them the opportunity to vote down a bailout for workers? Quick, someone enroll the Democratic Party in Politics 101.
GM’s divisions in Canada and Germany are asking those governments for help. It will be something if Canada and Germany come through for the American automaker and the American government doesn’t.
Conservative talking heads are saying GM is a “failed business model” unworthy of a $25 billion bailout. These are the same talking heads who favored pouring $700 billion into a failed financial model.
F. William Engdahl
Global Research
November 24, 2008
On Friday November 21, the world came within a hair’s breadth of the most colossal financial collapse in history according to bankers on the inside of events with whom we have contact. The trigger was the bank which only two years ago was America’s largest, Citigroup. The size of the US Government de facto nationalization of the $2 trillion banking institution is an indication of shocks yet to come in other major US and perhaps European banks thought to be ‘too big to fail.’
Paulson demanded, and got from a labile US Congress, Democrat as well as Republican, sole discretion over how and where he can invest the $700 billion, to date with no effective oversight. It amounts to the Treasury Secretary in effect ‘spitting into the wind’ in terms of resolving the fundamental crisis.
The clumsy way in which US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, himself not a banker but a Wall Street ‘investment banker’, whose experience has been in the quite different world of buying and selling stocks or bonds or underwriting and selling same, has handled the unfolding crisis has been worse than incompetent. It has made a grave situation into a globally alarming one.
“Chase recently received $25 billion in federal funding. What effect will that have on the business side and will it change our strategic lending policy?”
It was Oct. 17, just four days after JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, agreed to take a $25 billion capital injection courtesy of the United States government, when a JPMorgan employee asked that question. It came toward the end of an employee-only conference call that had been largely devoted to meshing certain divisions of JPMorgan with its new acquisition, Washington Mutual.
Which, of course, it also got thanks to the federal government. Christmas came early at JPMorgan Chase.
The JPMorgan executive who was moderating the employee conference call didn’t hesitate to answer a question that was pretty politically sensitive given the events of the previous few weeks.
Given the way, that is, that Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had decided to use the first installment of the $700 billion bailout money to recapitalize banks instead of buying up their toxic securities, which he had then sold to Congress and the American people as the best and fastest way to get the banks to start making loans again, and help prevent this recession from getting much, much worse.
On Monday, September 29—the first debate where Pat Tiberi was to make an appearance—was held at a public school in Delaware, Ohio. Tiberi arrived just hours after he went “his own way” in Washington and opposed the $700 billion bailout package.
However, when the US Congressional candidates were introduced, David Robinson again was the only candidate to appear. Robinson waited for nearly two minutes for his first question while Tiberi sent word into event organizers to remind them of their agreement that no recordings were to be made of the event—threatening to leave “until the recording devices were shut off.” (The Liberty Voice was the only video press present to cover the event.) After The Liberty Voice was safely silenced while attempting to assert the people’s right to a free and independent press, Tiberi finally entered the room and announced:
“We had a vote today that I told the President, ‘NO!’ Some say I can’t tell the president, ‘NO!’ But I told my party leadership, ‘NO!’ Because at the end of the day, when I look into my daughter’s eyes, it’s about her.”
Like America, some of the greatest British journalists and analysts also happen to be comedians. Watching The Last Laugh with John Bird (in the guise of investment banker, George Parr) and John Fortune (together known as the Long Johns), the same can certainly be said in Britain as well.
This is a transcript of this insightful comedian team who brilliantly and accurately describe the mindset of the investment banking community in this satirical interview. It was especially insightful considering this was recorded last year.
For the first time in recent memory Congress listened to the American people and blocked Paulson’s bailout of his rich buddies by US taxpayers. The same Congress that refuses the public’s demand that the Bush regime be held accountable and its gratuitous wars halted refused to hand over $700 billion to the financial institutions whose irresponsibility has brought the US to its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Economic collapse brings together the strangest bedfellows: Michael Moore and RINO Pat Tiberi.
Despite Pat Tiberi’s voting record which has handed taxpayer money over to no-bid contractors and often supported corporate welfare, Pat Tiberi decided to actually “go his own way” (despite a 93% lock-step record with President Bush) which is ironically on the same path of Michael Moore. We salute Pat Tiberi on this choice. I guess with $830,000 already in the Tiberi’s WAR chest from financial and security companies over the past eight years, Tiberi would rather finally side with his voting block (and just in time for the election!) rather than again rewarding bad behavior. It remains to be seen however if the voters of Ohio’s 12th Congressional District will have amnesia of the trillions of no-bid appropriations and corporate bailouts Tiberi has already approved.
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