George Bush Doesn't Care About...Anybody. And He's A Fuckin' Idiot.
"Again, I want to thank you all for -- and, Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. The FEMA Director is working 24 -- they're working 24 hours a day."
“I want to thank you, Mr. Secretary, for working over the weekend...”
Those two phrases were uttered by perhaps the dumbest man to ever occupy the Oval Office. Don't they sound similar? And don't the two situations look ominously similar? Statements made in the aftermath of disaster. Praise for a government bureaucrat.
The only difference is, in this case, ruining recovery won't just affect one city, it could plunge the whole world into a recession.
The first quote above was made by George Bush in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina. The second is fresh off the barbie, today.
God knows I am so fed up with this mental midget in the White House. Please forgive my appropriation of Kanye West's quote for the title of this post, but it fits.
Apparently today is International Disturbed People's Day, or at least so says a good friend of mine via an email. So I guess we ought to be celebrating dumb-ass George Bush. But I'm in no mood to celebrate this...damn...I can't even call him monkey because that would be disrespectful to the primates.
So today, this...idiot...says that he's confident that the United States is weathering the financial storm caused by some overzealous, overly-smart money managers down on Wall Street and their mortgage-backed securities. This following the collapse of BearSterns, the huge investment bank, resulting in a government-engineered sellout to JPMorganChase for the bargain-basement price of about $2.20 per share.
To give you an idea of the magnitude of the failure, Bear was trading at a touch over $25 a share on Friday. And over the weekend, it was sold for a whopping 90% off. Total sale price: $260 million. And that includes Bears midtown Manhattan headquarters, which itself is valued at $1.2 billion! Fire sale.
Now, here's my beef: the president congratulates the Secretary of the Treasury for working on a Saturday to engineer a bailout of a big investment bank. But what about the millions of people who work both Saturdays and Sundays, and the occasional night. Millions of people in this country work 80, 90 hours a week, simply to make ends meet. Millions more work those hours to be high achievers. All of us do these things in order to get a piece of the American Dream: a house, some mutual fund shares, take a damned vacation one year.
And what about the millions of homeowners, many who took bad financial instruments in order to get their homes, who will lose their homes and all their personal wealth when they get foreclosed on. Yes, some of them were ill-suited for homeownership. But most are just people trying to get ahead according to the rules of the game as it is presently constructed.
Where is our bailout? I've got some bills I'd love to have done away with. I know most of my readers have a few that could use forgiving too.
Where's our congratulations on working a weekend? Or working nights? Or working all the above.
Why is it such a monumental achievement for Henry Paulson to come in and put in long hours to get a task done, when millions upon millions of Americans do it every single day of the year, with no reward and no consideration.
Why are we bailing out a company where the executives, particularly Alex Schwarz, Bear's CEO, will walk away with millions, even as they cost a third of Bear's employees their jobs. (By the way Schwarz made about $160 million over the past five years.)
George Bush will, on one hand, violate his own "ideological opposition" to government intervention in the markets, and on the other hand, he'll give most taxpayers a paltry rebate of $600 to boost the economy. But oh yeah, the wealthiest Americans saw a reduction of, on average $30,000, in taxes during the last tax cuts.
Did you get that much of a break? Or, more likely, did your taxes go up, because you're now subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax?
And yeah, Georgie, you're doing a helluva job...
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: George Bush Doesn't Care About...Anybody. And He's A Fuckin' Idiot..
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.obsidianhustle.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/157
While I agree, GWB (and i don't mean the bridge) is intellectually challenged, I think that we err in suggesting that everyone caught up in the mortgage crisis is without responsibility for entering into these transactions. What ever happened to the risk/reward equation?? Financial advisors from Suze Orman to Robert Kagasaki warned of the risky financial products that people used to buy more house then they could afford. Its not just the banks that are at fault, their greed fed consumer greed--many people made (and i will be kind here) unwise decisions!
The Fed bailed out Bear to stabilize the financial markets. Keep in mind that last October , Bear was trading for over $125/share, so a lot of people lost LOTS of money FAST. So I don't think very many people are happy with the result of the bailout. Whats more, I suspect several other financial companies have over stated their book value which could create further instability. Since I have heard some talk about banks shutting down and freezing assets, I have taken some cash out, in an effort to hedge the downside of banks failures.
What ever happened to taking responsibility for your own decisions and accepting the consequences for their mistakes?? Why is it OK that people can go buy multiple properties, end up upside down and expect the government to bail them out?? Or even if its only one house--there were PLENTY of programs to help people buy affordable homes. But people have to be positioned to take advantage of opportunity. AND make decisions wisely! If you have bad credit--you pay more for a loan. If you don't have money saved, you pay more for a loan. If you don't do your due diligence, you have to pay the price. This is nothing new.
I used to work in a chemical plant 10 years ago in western new york. The writing was on the wall for YEARS as to what was happening in the manufacturing sector. YEARS!! It was no secret that manufacturing jobs were being shipped overseas because these guys-with high school educations were paid 6 figures to run the plant. Labor was hella expensive. They had the income, yet didn't make the necessary changes in their lifestyle/skillset to insure future income. I didn't understand that. So when they lost their jobs because the company sold the plant because it wasn't very profitable, whose responsibility is it if these guys can no longer make ends meet. Or if they were over extended in debt. I would feel very differently if they were just making it above the poverty line, but they were making more than me at the time and I was management!
All I am saying is that everything has a price. If you assume lots of risk, you might win big, but chances are, you won't. You have to accept both the upside and downside scenarios--unless you can figure out a way to hedge the downside.
Just my two cents.
I certainly agree with you that many, many people made plain-stupid financial choices regarding their aspirations to be property owners.
Some were driven by greed, and they will suffer greatly for such short-sightedness.
Most were moved to become part of the American Dream, but with poor, non-existent, or in some cases, completely false information. Sadly, it is this group that will pay a disproportionate cost.
I also agree completely with your points regarding personal responsibility in the context of financial decision-making and personal/professional development.
Those that exercise poor choice in either of those areas will pay a price, and rightly so.
But an engineered bailout of firms who created investments so complex that they couldn't even understand them is plain wrong.
As an economics major and follower of the markets, the government-engineered bailout of BearStearns reminds me a lot of the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management in 1994, and causes me concern.
Do you remember LTCM?
Like Bear, LTCM developed and used complex mathematical models to take advantage of fixed income arbitrage, this time centered around mortgage-backed securities, but unlike LTCM the underlying assets were not nearly as stable as Treasury notes, or other government-backed securities.
The collapse of LTCM was precipitated by massive defaults in the underlying securities -- in their case Russia's default on their government-backed obligations -- and a flight-to-quality.
The same thing is happening now with Bear.
My beef is that Fed's involvement in this rescue, as it was with LTCM, does nothing to force these investment banks to rein in their risky behavior. It says, in effect "go ahead, be reckless...We're there to catch you," and their lack of involvement on the consumer side actually did more harm to the general economy.
It was wrong then. It's wrong now.
If the Federal Reserve is going to intervene on the investment banks' behalf in the event of trouble, why did the Fed not intervene to shore up the underlying assets: the mortgages for the home-owners? Surely that have been better for the economy as a whole: maintaining overall housing prices, stabilizing jobs in the home construction industry, maintaining home-ownership, and ultimately securing these same securities markets.
But back to Bear, these current actions by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the U.S. Department of the Treasury concern me because they create a "moral hazard," that is, if I know you'll bail me out, I'm artificially insulated from risk, and I'll likely behave differently from the way it would behave if I were fully exposed to the risk.
That, I believe, does us a disservice, and doesn't put the best interest of the citizens first, since it encourages a boom/bust cycle, rather than stable growth.
The market would have corrected -- and is correcting -- itself. Bear would have been absorbed at some point anyway, but their failure would have been an object lesson for their contemporaries.
Example: both Goldman and Lehman announced better-than-expected earnings today, even though each took a serious beating, with earnings down 53 and 57 percent, respectively.
But they survived. Let the market work. Wall Street will be fine. Bear was too aggressive and they paid for it with their independence.
The bad positions held by these banks are being unwound as we speak, and they will press on for the most part.
Everything does have a price, you're right. In this case though, most of the costs are being borne by the individual citizen, regardless of their individual complicity in the problem, and it's harming the larger economy.