Go, Economy!

That's why you only gamble what you can afford to lose. People who signed up for mortgages they can't afford deserve to lose everything.

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Originally Posted by Yoshi

You finally realized that government intervention is never the answer. ;)

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Don't get me wrong, I still think regulation and oversight would have gone a long way toward preventing this sort of bullshit, but once the damage is done, I still understand how money works, and how a 700 billion dollar bailout doesn't go well with free market economics.

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Originally Posted by Bacon McShig

I'd love if it were that simple, but you can't simply remove support columns from the economy and expect the collapsing ceiling to fall in such a perfect, pinpoint fashion that only the guilty are injured.

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Look, the shit is going to hurt us all for a while, but the bailout is ultimately like taking out a new credit card to pay off your old credit card. It's a great stall tactic, but money doesn't come from nowhere and it makes things worse in the end. If what Lehman owns is worth anything, let the private sector scoop them up. This just looks like a bad buy on a massive scale to me.

Trust me, I understand there will be innocent casualties. My family lost their farm early this year because of the real estate crisis. Not because they took out a sub prime mortgage but just because of how fucked up its made the housing market, and their inability to unload a great house that they had their money tied up in. It sucks. It really does. But it's only going to get worse if we just try to funnel imaginary money into this shit and act like it won't turn our currency into monopoly money.

VOLATILE MUCH?

I wanted to invest yest afternoon. But I have no money. I tried to get my father to put some cash in for me.

He said no.

I would have sold today. :(

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Originally Posted by Yoshi

What oil prices are you watching? Prices have nothing to do with supply. Every time something positive happens in the economy, like interest rates being lowered, oil automatically and artificially goes up. It's a crooked oligopoly, not supply and demand.

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it's been going up steadily, ignoring this month of insanity

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul128.html

*COUGH*

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Originally Posted by Frogacuda

But it's only going to get worse if we just try to funnel imaginary money into this shit and act like it won't turn our currency into monopoly money.

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The money would be no more imaginary than the money in your 401K; its liquidity would depend on the faith in the market. It's not as though the treasury would be printing $700 billion extra to cover the debt.

My problem with your viewpoint is that you're trying to imbue the market with magical powers. From what I've read, we could be facing a full-scale depression. A depression is not a recession. Markets naturally go up and down, and the market can usually recover from a recession without intervention. The economy cannot recover from a depression on its own. If the market were a human body, a recession would be a cold, something that we can fight off ourselves with time, but a depression would be cancer. There's nothing built into the system itself that will kill the cancer.

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Originally Posted by flux=rad

It's not as though the treasury would be printing $700 billion extra to cover the debt.

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Effectively that is what they'd be doing though, unless we got a full rebound on the value of those interests, which seems unlikely.

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From what I've read, we could be facing a full-scale depression. A depression is not a recession.

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I'm well aware of the media scaremongering, but I'd like to remind you that we tried these large scale bailouts in 1929, too. There's no reason the market can't rebound on its own, and there's no reason we can't still slip into a depression after this bailout. I know what the man on the TV said, and I agree it's scary, but it's a very one-sided view that isn't grounded in history.

the government got reeeeallly fucking involved in the thirties - you may have learned about it in school

all the government needs to do here is play the role of a really huge opportunistic investor

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Originally Posted by Frogacuda

I'm well aware of the media scaremongering, but I'd like to remind you that we tried these large scale bailouts in 1929, too. There's no reason the market can't rebound on its own, and there's no reason we can't still slip into a depression after this bailout. I know what the man on the TV said, and I agree it's scary, but it's a very one-sided view that isn't grounded in history.

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There's no sense in being so condescending. Admittedly, I have no idea whether the proposed bailout would help at all. I'm pretty sure that no one has any clue what will happen either way. The global economy is a rapidly expanding set of interdependencies that no one person can wrap their head around. I do not have a lot of faith in laissez faire capitalism though, and I'm very surprised to see people touting its virtues in the midst of this crisis.

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Originally Posted by Yoshi

That's why you only gamble what you can afford to lose. People who signed up for mortgages they can't afford deserve to lose everything.

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This I completely agree with. Hell, maybe we should all stop paying our student loans and have the Feds buy those up as well. Then we can move on to car payments.