“Man, this is a tough call. I wish we’d have the guts to just ride out the storm and let the free market correct itself. But let’s be honest- if the deal falls apart and the DOW really does go down 3000 points then Congress will just convene and pass the darn thing anyway. And Republicans will get the blame and a huge amount of economic damage will have been done.”
You make an excellent point, but what if the effect of this bill is to 1: ramp the markets for two days, 2: the DJ sells off 3K points anyway (admittedly from a 400 point (say) higher level, and 3: bailout v 2.0 is enacted. 4: The Hanktator comes back for bailouts 2, 3, and 4.
IOW, what if this bill IN NO WAY addresses (what I believe to be) the underlying problem, which is NOT affixing blame to the Dems, NOT reflating FOH (friends of Hank) bank balance sheets, etc etc; The problem is TRUST. TRUST has been shattered by an ongoing lack of enforcement of rules and a blithe deliberate and arrogant inattention on the part of regulators to ongoing, festering problems. The TRUST problem is NOT addressed by enacting a black box series of regulations and exceptions and opaque buddy-buddy workouts and short-circuits that are simply one arbitrary state in an ongoing series of mid-game rule rewrites.
Changing the rules mid-game, and empowering the purveyors of the problem assets without recourse or recrimination for their prior acts of fraud is, in the end, nothing but a RATIFICATION of the money vs integrity power these banks have wielded to get us where we are today. These rash enactments IMHO will only serve to foster the bank run, the flight of capital from US markets, they are allegedly designed to halt. Taxpayers at this point should count on a quadrupling or quintupling of the dollar amount of this bailout, which will have nothing but a delaying effect on what MUST happen to clean up the US financial system.
we would rather lose an election than compromise our principle. The market will correct itself. Yes it will hurt short term, but we will come out of it MUCH stronger.
And no doubt if Obama become president, the economy will be in much better shape and unfairly gets the credit for it