[TonyXL]

The Federal Reserve is printing dollars to bail out a company that made bad financial decisions. As you pay higher prices over the next few years, just remember that YOU are paying for those bad decisions.

[wideawake]

Good thing that Bear Stearns' Chairman, James Cayne, spent two weeks on vacation at a bridge tournament last summer while the bank was losing billions on subprime loan bets.

[cardinal4]

The bailout hasnt done a damn thing to the market-its tanking badly..

[Uncledave]

As you pay higher prices over the next few years

Income taxes aside, this is inflating the currency - bad for anyone who gets paid in dollars.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

It’s called capitalism. Thank goodness they’re not extending extra unemployment insurance payments. That’d be socialist!

[HamiltonJay]

Its going to get a LOT worse before it gets better.. the snakes that have created this mess are dilluding themselves and the politicians are too cowardly to stand up and be honest.

We’ll all bail out these miscreants, because they can’t let the rich criminals actually pay for their crimes... come on man, these are NY bankers... they are the elites, they are better than you peasants, now shut up and bail them out.

[Ghost of Philip Marlowe]

Are you sure the Feds are printing money for this?

Last I heard they are not printing, that any deflation we are suffering is from the dollar falling compared to other currencies.

[dfwgator]

[babble-on]

This isn’t a bailout. Its financing. Bear Stearns shareholders will end up with nothing, as will a lot of their creditors. This financing just allows the recognition of those losses to take place in a less chaotic fashion.

[Cinnamon Girl]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

[Man50D]

I was thinking the same thing this morning as they were discussing the bailout. Small business makes up most of the business in the U.S. but the Fed will never bailout Joe Shmoe's business if he is about to go under because of bad business decisions.

Meanwhile the Bush Administration also bails out homeowners who can't pay off their mortgages because they over extended themselves and is going to give millions of people a "tax rebate" that comes from other taxpayers and won't fix the problem in the long run. It's a shell game.

Compounding the problem are the socialists Democrats who are doing everything they can to raise taxes by ending the tax cuts. In the end the taxpayer will get stuck with the bill for the whole mess.

[RC2]

Cut our taxes to bare minimum and they can’t do this. Stop all borrowing from other countries....especially China.

[DuncanWaring]

Is Bear-Stearns the one that a day or two ago said something to the effect of “There is absolutely no truth to any rumors that we are having any difficulty whatsoever”?

[Uncle Miltie]

Betting it all on RED is what people do when it’s other peoples’ money. If you win, you get a huge payout. If you lose, you get your salary, and move on to the next job.

There is not enough down-side risk for the participants when they are betting other people’s money with the leveraged comp plans these people get. They need to have some substantial personal downside to horribly risky bets that go bad.

[Age of Reason]

As you pay higher prices over the next few years, just remember that YOU are paying for those bad decisions.

I don't suppose Bear Sterns executives forgoing their bonuses was a condition of this bailout?

[CORedneck]

I think the Bear Stearns executives should be taken out and strung up by their b---s ! All of these executives including those from Countrywide need to pay for their screw up. The rest of us take it in the shorts each time an executive screws up and to add insult to injury, the executive gets a golden parachute package deal when they leave the screwed up company.

An executive screw up, we take it in the shorts -> stock market diving down, dollar takes another hit which means higher prices for foreign goods or travel, shareholders losing their value in stock. We have to work harder because of these idiots !

[HereInTheHeartland]

“The Federal Reserve is printing dollars to bail out a company that made bad financial decisions. As you pay higher prices over the next few years, just remember that YOU are paying for those bad decisions.”

Keeping the wheels from falling off everything, looks like a priority at this point.
That seems like it should be one of the roles of limited government; similar to what they did in 1987.

[Nervous Tick]

>> The Federal Reserve responded swiftly to pleas from Bear Stearns that its coffers had “significantly deteriorated” within a 24-hour period

Say... yathink that’ll work if WE try it? My coffers could use a little topping off...

“Dear Ben,

How are you? Wife and kids OK? Swell GQ beard thing you got going!

Say, Ben, I was wondering if you could float me some of that free Federal money...

...”

[pfony1]

IMHO, it is the JOB of the FED to prevent “runs” on banks caused by panicked depositors. So I am very pleased that the threatened “run” on Bear Stearns has now been stopped, without the FED having to print a single new dollar ( notwithstanding your ill-informed “comment” to the contrary).

America is still a free country, so you can be “nostalgic” for the 20%+ unemployment rates, the impoverishment of the middle class and the bread-lines of the Great Depression, if the prospect of a return to such misery is pleasing to you.

But I much prefer the “soft landing” that Bernanke seems to be pulling off, in spite of all the well-paid gloom-merchants who dominate the media.

And in spite of the moralistic bleating of people who could benefit from learning the difference between “adding liquidity” and “printing money”.

[TopQuark]

YOU are paying for those bad decisions

You are absolutely correct, Tony, no question about it.

What I am curious about is why is everyone so up in arms when it is Wall Street that makes a mistake? Scores of nurses and carpenters quit their jibs in the last few years to flip houses. Why do not anyone object when we bail them out? People simply walk out on the homes whose value falls below the mortgage. They are never to be blamed and must also be bailed out.

Has class warfare so permeated our culture that the suffering of anyone related to Wall Street causes joy? And its not even officers of the company that suffer here -- its the millions of retirees, widows and orphans, whose mutual funds own Bear's stock. They lost one half of the money today.

[montag813]

"You're thinking of this CDO all wrong. As if they had the money back in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's in a super senior synthetic tranche hedged with a CDS on Joe's house...right next to yours. Supported by the excess spread from the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin's house, and a hundred others. Why, you're lending the Orange County firemen's retirement fund the money to short builders commercial paper, and then, they're all going to pay it back to you as best they can."