700 billion bailout for the stock market?

You are SO RIGHT!! I think the same way, the only problem is , I found out through my nephew, ( works at a prominent brokerage firm ,U.B.S) the economy would suffer much more and much sooner had the gov't. said " to hell with ya , you made this mess , too bad, suck it up". The economic implosion would raise particular hell RIGHT NOW and virtually everywhere had the gov't. done nothing. Not that this move makes everything all warm and fuzzy , it doesn't. It sucks.Fortunately, they have changed the rules some for the clown princes that started this B.S. so that the same thing does not happen again, at least by the same method.

This shows that when government gets into private business operations things get screwed up. The Democrats back in the 1990's changed the rules so banks could lend money to anyone who did not have a house. If you were a first time buyer, you didn't even need to put down any money, and were protected by law. Bank managers looked inwardly and were greedy looking at their own salaries. When Reagan was in office, we started the longest period of prosperity to ever hit this nation. The stock market for example was only DOW 2000. Dems blame Repub, and visa versa. There isn't much difference between the parties anymore. Last week, Nancy Polosi and Harry Reid were, throwing all kinds of stones at Bush for the 700 Billion bail out. Now it is in their court. Lets see if they agree with Bush, and approve it, or if in fact they raise the $700 billion to a Trillion. The numbers will be the proof of who is who, and if there is any difference in the parties. Banks have failed before, and personally I think we should let this slip and pay the consequences now rather than later.

I agree with you however the gov had no better choice.

If the gov did not do this, we would have had a total banking collapse within a week. And that would make the Great Depression look like an E-Ticket ride at Disneyland.

We had LEH went BK overnight (09-15-2008).

http://www.lehman.com/press/pdf_2008/091508_lbhi_c...

AIG - the largest insurance company in the world, with $1 Trillion in assets was ~80% taken over by the US Gov. in exchange for a $85 billion 2 year loan at a high interest rate (09-16-2008).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Internationa...

MER was likely to go BK within 2 days of LEH's default if BAC did not buy them before the market opened last Monday (09-15-2008).

http://thechronicleherald.ca/Business/1079224.html

MS was about 2 steps from BK risk last Thursday (09-18-2008) as the stock had plunged to as low as $12/ sh. GS would likely have followed shortly.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/m...

WM, WB, and whoever else would have joined the bank/ broker failure.

15 banks had already been seized by the FDIC since 2007 to date.

http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklis...

Panic in the markets and the financial system had been increasing and world governments poured $180 Billion to provide liquidity in global markets.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic...

Buyers stopped buying the stock, and sellers dumped in fear that the financial stocks would all fail at anytime.

US Treasuries had traded with a negative yield for a brief time last week, the first time since January 1940.

http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSNYG00...

A NY money market fund went bellie up, breaking the $1.00 net asset value (NAV), where investors got back 97 cents on the dollar from a cash investment that is supposed to be relatively safe but not guaranteed.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/money-market...

A Putnum money market fund closed itself after it got $40 billion redemption requests within a week.

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf50...

People were pulling money out of money market funds in mass and putting them into Treasuries. It was like this kind of thinking,

'I don't care if I make any interest, I just don't want to lose my principle.'

We were looking at a classic run on financial institutions, where even cash (and money market) was perceived too risky to hold.

The proposed $700 Billion "bailout" is not a bailout of the stock market, but rather a bailout of US and certain foreign banks (and brokers) who do a substantial domestic mortgage lending business in the USA.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080921/bs_nm/financia...

Is it right or wrong? We'll, most of us don't like it, however a total collapse of the US financial and banking system would have been a far more costly catastrophe unlike anything in world history.

Remember the first baelout...25 bilyun $ was spozed tu fix evreethang.

just a fyu short months ago.

Now the latest paement = 700 bil more.

Next month it will be 1 Trilyun, & kounting.

Next yeer the guvt will oen evree hous in thr kuntree, on paper NE-wae.

i believe the better question is

"if i open a coffee shop (a legitimate business) and then have to go bankrupt from dumb moves, will the government bail me out and offer me protection?"

i didn't think so...... we should not be bailing these banks out so they can just enforce all the ARM loans they have on people. every ARM should be nulled if we are using our money to bail them out!!!!! write congress.

Well, if you don't mind loosing all your life savings then the bail out would not be necessary.

Vote Obama 08 to prevent stupid politics in the white house and to prevent this from happening again.

This is why privatizing big financial organizations such as banks and insurance is such a bad idea. It is wrong that we are now paying for the mistakes make by the Republican party. This all began with Regan and has just spiraled downwards sense.