As our great and venerable (throat clears) leaders continue to debate the bailout of banks and millions who cannot afford their homes, I thought that I’d share some quotes that might bring some perspective to the issue:
On the value of money nowadays:
And to think, $50 billion use to sound like an unimaginable amount of money. Now the way people throw around the world billion, $50 billion sounds like milk money.
I bet with the inflation our country is going to go through after this bailout, you will actually need close to that for milk. - Jason F.
On WaMu failure and Funding of the FDIC:
WOW! The FDIC prefers to move in and take over at 5pm on Fridays to give them the weekend to clear things up and so people can’t panic as much-that shows just how bad things were for WaMu if they couldn’t wait 24 hours.
On a WaMu side note-we just got a new client at my firm in the past month, her father passed away and surprisingly left her 2.5 million. 750k of that was in WaMu CD’s. I was trying to get my boss to really press them to get the money out asap, regardless of penalties, but they wanted to wait on the “death put” (in case of death a cd can be paid out without penalty) to avoid losing out on any money. Talk about Penny smart, Pound foolish! Please people, DO NOT keep more than the FDIC limits in your bank accounts. I know that may be hard for some business accounts but you never know who and when this is going to happen to next.
Next order of business for congress-bailing out the FDIC. With all the talk about ‘bailouts’, you’d think there was a sinking ship around here… - Bob H.
On the bailout stall in Congress:
Good. I am glad the House Republicans are stalling this. We need serious debate over this issue, before we hand over 700 billion dollars of our money. This reminds me of the Patriot Act. Legislation was rammed through Congress so fast that watchdog groups had little time to examine the bill.
Extraordinary legislation deserves extraordinary due diligence. - Matthew G.
On the Bailout:
An outright bailout of people and institutions reinforces bad patterns that emerge again down the road in a new set of clothes. I’m not sure if nothing can be done now, but it seems like there must be some sort of middle road where financial solutions can be reached while still keeping the people on the hook that made poor decisions. - Scott S.
On the Consequences of a Bailout:
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Unfortunately the reaction isn’t always obvious. This bailout will cause problems that can’t be foreseen now. How often has the government done something only to have it backfire? - Richard W.
On government intervention aka. Bailout:
I think it’s preposterous and tampering with the free market. I believe that one of the reasons we’re in this mess is because the Fed forced rates to stay low for so long after they were due to increase, which led to the buying spree, inflated prices, and further blowing the bubble. - Alan B.
Tags: bailout, congress, Foreclosures, housing, housing bailout, Mortgages, paulson