Posted on 03/16/2008 9:03:57 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson did the rounds of America's Sunday morning TV shows to talk up the U.S. economy, promote confidence that financial markets would get through their present troubles and reassure a skeptical American public that the Bush administration was on top of the situation. news
Speaking on ABC's "This Week," "Fox News Sunday" and "Late Edition" on CNN, Paulson defended the Federal Reserve's decision Friday to come to the rescue of Bear Stearns (nyse: BSC -
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Remember the Washington Mutual commercials making fun of all the old stodgy bankers? Maybe we need to go back and have some of those guys running the banks.
Yeah, but Bear Stears did get effectively liquidated today...
Not as risky as it once was! Literally - this sort of activity on behalf of the fed goes directly into the mathematical models used to gauge risk. With every such action, the associated terms in the stochastic differential equations are modified in favor of accepting shakier manipulations. We are just watching that spring get wound up tighter and tighter.
Monday morning's theme song on Wall Street: "It's Raining Men."
“Fed is printing more money....”
But is it printing enough?
Let’s think about this a minute. Some complain that the fed is injecting too much money in the economy. But how much money has been “burned” out of the economy by all the losses that home owners, banks, shareowners, etc. have sustained. I would venture to guess that it’s well over a trillion... and counting - all gone from the economy. So if the fed is injecting money to keep the current situation from destroying even more wealth, is that bad? In fact, should it do even more? Do we want another great depression? Check out Friedman’s “Free to Choose” - he claims the depression happened because the fed did not do ENOUGH.
I really don’t know what the answer is. But it’s something I never hear addressed. I imagine given that we had a bubble, things were overvalued and that may have to be flushed out of the system, but as the bubble pops I hope we can do something so we don’t end up with the gum down our throat and choke on it!
This money thing is very complex... if someone in FRdom understands this stuff, I would sure like to hear from him/her.
2 dollars a share??? liquidation? what is the difference?
If the current currency trending continues, the ink the Fed uses to print the American dollar -- will be worth more, maybe a lot more.
Dollar plunges to fresh lows against euro, yen --again!
If the current currency trending continues, the ink the Fed uses to print the American dollar -- will be worth more, maybe a lot more.
Dollar plunges to fresh lows against euro, yen --again!
for all the extremely pedantic posters who have clogged up other threads on Friday with their sophmoric obsession with allegory-free postings it is hereby stipulated that the term "print money" is used herein as a convenient shorthand for the process of creation of additional debt based fiat money via the mechanism of ledger entries by existing member banks of the Federal Reserve System, and is not meant to imply actual printing of physical federal reserve notes by the US Treasury in every instance.
Bear Stearns Stock Fell Dramatically Over the Weekend
Stock Sold for $ 2 Billion Profit at on February 14th
Insiders unloaded 27,316,339 Shares for about $ 70 + per share on February 14, 2008. For a profit of about $ 2 Billion ! ! ! !
What did they know and when did they know it ?
Bernanke and Paulson have a lot of questions to answer.
And this liberal approach to fiscal policy is exactly why we are in the mess we are in.. Corporations get whatever they want, and we get screwed. Can't let them collapse, heaven forbid, they might not fund our next election campaign.
Did you see on TV, Paulson was vigorously shaking his head “no no no” side to side, while saying our financial system is sound etc.
The conflicted body language was amazing. It’s worth watching.
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