I think “swallow” is a good choice of word, since taxpayers are now Wall Street’s bitches.
“‘America’s economy is facing unprecedented challenges and we are responding with unprecedented action,’ [President Bush] said. ‘There will be ample opportunities to debate the origins of this problem. Now is the time to solve it.'” In other words: PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!!! (Read more from guardian.co.uk)
SEE ALSO:
Grasping at Straws
On Friday morning, Senator Christopher Dodd, the head of the Senate Banking Committee, was interviewed on ABC’s ‘Good Morning America.’ Dodd revealed that just hours earlier at an emergency meeting convened by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, lawmakers were told that ‘We’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system.’ Dodd added somberly, that in his three decades of serving in public office, he had ‘never heard language like this.’ . . . The problems cannot be resolved by shifting the debts of the banks onto the taxpayer. That’s an illusion. By adding another $1 or $2 trillion dollars to the National Debt, Paulson is just ensuring that interest rates will go up, real estate will crash, unemployment will soar, and foreign central banks will abandon the dollar. In truth, there is no fix for a deleveraging market anymore than there is a fix for gravity. The belief that massive debts and insolvency can be erased by increasing liquidity just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. That’s why Henry Paulson is the worst possible person to be orchestrating the so called rescue project. Paulson comes from a business culture which rewards deception, personal acquisitiveness, and extreme risk-taking. (Read more from prisonplanet.com)
Treasury Seeks Asset-Buying Power Unchecked by Courts (Update2) By Alison Fitzgerald and John Brinsley
Sept. 21 (Bloomberg) — The Bush administration sought unchecked power from Congress to buy $700 billion in bad mortgage investments from financial companies in what would be an unprecedented government intrusion into the markets. Through his plan, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson aims to avert a credit freeze that would bring the financial system and the world’s largest economy to a standstill. The bill would prevent courts from reviewing actions taken under its authority. “He’s asking for a huge amount of power,” said Nouriel Roubini, an economist at New York University. “He’s saying, `Trust me, I’m going to do it right if you give me absolute control.’ This is not a monarchy.” (Read more from bloomberg.com)