Saying No to the Bailout Splurge
"We can take a fraction of the $700 billion dollars we save and use it for specific anti-recession measures. Let's start rebuilding our power grid; fix some bridges; maybe even help some homeowners with their mortgages where warranted. But no bailout for Wall Street; none." Just Say No says Tom Evslin. Liked the comment on the post by Terry Gold, who noticed that Evslin is a fan of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan. "I sent it to my Kindle today and will start reading it tonight."
Meanwhile, Michael Arrington rowed in with How The U.S. Government Engineered The Current Economic Crisis and generated a storm of comment, including this sharp one from Mitch Rosen: "I come to this site to get away from politics. Stay away from it. You could potentially lose the admiration of half your readers if they think you're on one side of the political spectrum, Mike, even if you didn't intentionally mean to alienate them."
Fair play to Arrington, though, for not avoiding the nettle: "Why did it happen?" he asks. "Let's go back to 1999, when Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, was under pressure by the Clinton administration to find a way to get more loans to 'borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans.' A pilot program was launched, which soon became general policy. Money flowed to people who couldn't afford to pay it back." This is brave of Arrington because in the next paragraph the name of former Fannie Mae Chairman Franklin Raines is mentioned. What make this controversial is that two week's ago Politico's Ben Smith alerted his readers to the fact that Raines had "taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters." Foxes and henhouses come to mind.
