by Scott Creighton
…”We just wanted to choose a really large number.” a treasury spokesman told Forbes Mag.
Are you kidding? Why is no one surprised by this? Article after the break.
Bad News For The Bailout
Brian Wingfield and Josh Zumbrun
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill seem determined to work together to pass a bill that will get the credit markets churning again. But will they do it this week, as some had hoped just a few days ago? Don’t count on it.
“Do I expect to pass something this week?” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., mused to reporters Tuesday. “I expect to pass something as soon as we can. I think it’s important that we get it done right, not get it done fast.”
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, says his office has gotten “close to zero” calls in support of the $700 billion plan proposed by the administration. He doubts it’ll happen immediately either. “I don’t think it has to be a week” he says. “If we do it right, then we need to take as long as it needs.”
The more Congress examines the Bush administration’s bailout plan, the hazier its outcome gets. At a Senate Banking Committee hearing Tuesday, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle complained of being rushed to pass legislation or else risk financial meltdown.
“The secretary and the administration need to know that what they have sent to us is not acceptable,” says Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn. The committee’s top Republican, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, says he’s concerned about its cost and whether it will even work.
In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.
“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
Wow. If it wants to see a bailout bill passed soon, the administration’s going to have to come up with some hard answers to hard questions. Public support for it already seems to be waning. According to a Rasmussen Reports poll released Tuesday, 44% of those surveyed oppose the administration’s plan, up from 37% Monday.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who testified before the Senate committee Tuesday, will get a chance to fine tune their answers Wednesday afternoon, when they appear before the House Financial Services Committee.
A spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., says she is optimistic that the House will pass a bill this week. But that doesn’t mean the Senate, which is by nature more sluggish than its larger counterpart on the other side of Capitol Hill, will be so quick to act.
“They will act first,” says Sen. Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “Many of our members today were just beginning to have interaction with Secretary Paulson.”
Dodd proposed his own counter-proposal to Paulson’s plan earlier this week. Among other things, it calls for limits on executive compensation at troubled firms and for the Treasury to take a contingent equity stake in those firms. On Tuesday, Paulson rebuffed both ideas, as it might discourage firms from participating in the bailout program.
Those things aside, lawmakers have plenty of other concerns with Treasury’s proposal. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., suggested the bailout be doled out perhaps $150 billion at a time, instead of $700 billion all at once. Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., says it has an initial cost of $2,300 for every man, woman and child in the country. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., calls it a “financial socialism and it’s un-American.”
Dodd says that in speaking with his Senate colleagues, all are agreed on three issues: that a bailout bill include some oversight accountability for the Treasury, protection for taxpayers and that it address the continuing foreclosure problem.
He also points to one other concern: Paulson, the bill’s chief architect, is scheduled to leave office in just four months.
“I’m not about to give a $700 billion appropriation to a secretary I don’t know yet,” says Dodd.
Filed under: Economic Crisis ie. Disaster Capitalism Tagged: | "we just wanted a really large number", 700 billion bailout, financial terrorism
So if the ceo’s will balk at the bail out if their compensatons are limited, then they must not need a bail out…… and what is $2,500 per person cost? Pardon me…. does that include all the ‘other’ stuff that has been charged against taxpayers? Like the cost of the fake war and rebuilding of Iraq and black mail payouts to Israel? Looks like if you add all that up , we have about $15,000 per person (including children). Now why would they use children in their totals? Guess it makes the total of per person a smite smaller… so it you take out the children, the totals might be about $5,000 per person, now take out the adults who do not pay taxes (no job, on welfare, on social security,) and you get about $10,000 per person. Now add that to our curent other stuff (not counting children and adults who donot pay taxes) and you get about $45,000 cost per person (tax payers). NOw, figure that each year’s cost of running the government is already taking more than our government collects each year…… that $45,000 will grow each year. More jobs are being cut and sent overseas… more people are jobless each month… that $45,000 figure will double in two years…… they know we cannot afford it…. the bail out will not help us. What would help us is a bailout of the regular people who were cheated out of their homes by home insurance companies (remember, they raised the cost until people had to abondon their homes… that started it) and then the increased mort. rate on current home owners… that blew a big hole in our economy… home owners did not make bad decisions…. they were cheated and forced to give up their homes… plus jobs sent overseas and the free market sending overseas made products back here to sell to people who are losing jobs…. crazy… no… we can’t bail out the crooks… but the ‘big top show’ that is going on in congress will pretend to fight this until they pretend to come to a fair decision (the same as they had planned on ) the crooks will bail out the other crooks… and they will move to other countries as America becomes a 4th world power and is poorer than the poorest of nations. We’ve been robbed.. the same as someone took a gun and robbed a bank…. except no one will arrest these robbers because they control the police. (who will also be living in the streets and abondoned by the crooks).
well, they are passing the bail out and from what it sounds like… Americans’ money is buying stock in wall street sort of giving us an equity in wall street… ain’t that nice? Now they can lose the money and no one can complain… after all you risk losing money when you buy stocks and that is the way it is…… happy stock holding America…
I read that the bailout plan was written at least two months ago. They apparently waited for things to deteriorate and then introduced the bill.
The Patriot Act was clearly written long before 9/11. According to even the most tepid of theories they waited for 9/11 to occur before introducing that law.
Prior to the U.S. entry into WWII, they knew Japan was going to attack Pearl Harbor. They waited and then used that attack to justify entering WWII.
See any pattern here?
Dave
http://daveeriqat.wordpress.com/