The Bush "rescue" (bailout) speech

Yes, Angie, I was referring to the Community Reinvestment Act. The Wikipedia entry is wildly skewed by those who are trying to spin this mess, so please do not take it too seriously.

The problem was not the push to make mortgages available to people who would not otherwise qualify. The problem was in (1) creating derivative securities of such opacity and complexity that they were allowed to be massively overvalued on the companies' books, supporting literally billions of dollars of bonuses to executives who were paid based on the number of transactions rather than the quality of transactions, while somnolent legislators and regulators and enforcement divisions and shareholders and press allowed it to happen, and then (2) the purchase of these worthless securities by customers like the Chinese, who use their hundreds of billions of dollars holdings in our debt securities to extort us to bail them out. Just as in the S&L mess, Wall Street lobbyists created legislation that essentially gave all of the downside risk to the taxpayers and all of the upside gains to the financial houses.

I'm just worried that the bailout will repeat that terrible mistake.

Screw the bailout. Just, seriously, it's insane. Forget the whole thing.

If we need companies to keep making loans, we should make money available to other companies and let them carry on. And we already bailed out Fannie and Freddie, so they can carry on with their purpose of purchasing conforming loans.

Same with collapsing banks. Yeah, FDIC is near broke and can't handle the level of demands if multiple large banks collapse at once...so let's bail FDIC out, instead of the banks. Sheesh. What is this, rocket science?

Likewise, with AIG, if it's really important that their insurance actually cover stuff, let us simply state that we will cover any shortfalls for existing policies, so if that company disintegrates due to lack of money, companies are still covered. We don't need to give AIG a dime.

These companies are only 'too big to fail' if we implement no recovery plan when they do. I said, let them fail, and let's stand there with a team waiting for it.

And, while we're at it, let's make sure we don't confuse 'plummeting stock prices' with 'failure'. Plummeting stock prices just means a competitor will snatch it up for cheap. Stock prices cannot lead to the failure of a company, just the hostile takeover.

And, to point out here what I've been pointing out to everyone in real life, right now, about $110 billion dollars of mortgages are in default in the entire country, aka, 1%, and something like 60%-80% of their value is eventually recoverable.

So, um...what's this '$700 billion'? That's something like 6% of all mortgages.

See, folks, you thought it was a good thing the Democrats have been completely spineless the last few years, and now you're seeing the real problem. It's going to be you guys that stops this thing, because Congressional Democrats are total morons who forget what happened the last few times they were rushed into a bill.