Fiasco on the Grandest of Scales

Steve Dekorte...

"Frankly, I'm amazed there aren't (yet) riots in the streets. These public purchases of overpriced assets are a transference of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy on the grandest of scales. Apparently "liquidity" means the ability of the wealthy to unload their bad investments on the public.

The most absurd result of all this is the blame being placed on the "free market" when it is exactly the lack of a free market in currency (via handing a monopoly on currency that caused credit bubble."

http://www.dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi?do=item&id=3592

Me here...

People generally are disconnected from Washington DC, or even their state and local governments. At least locally they see levies and propositions on an understandable level: do they want to spend $X on the fire department or a library.

At the national level, I've been surprised for years that we're willing to just spend incredible amounts of money on the aftermath of a war that had always been based on documented lies.

This current fiasco is just more of the numbingly same. Paulson - "Give me $700B on the condition that you must have no oversight into how that money is spent."

Oh, did you know that's the condition? That's spelled out literally in the proposal. I will never vote for any of my representatives who back such legislation.

Folks - at least fellow citizens of the USA - we are being *taken to the cleaners* on this. This is a *fiasco* of the grandest of scales. Look around at who's already lined up to get their piece of the action. There is no way this much money can be put on the table without a lot of shady behavior.

In this case enough of the shenanigans are taking place right out in the open to cause riots in the streets.

As for whether a purely free market could do better - I'm not the expert. I'm skeptical there could be such a thing as a "purely free market". It's a system, and people work the system for their own goals. Sometimes those goals are admirable. Most often not.

The term "free market" is used by most politicians and financiers as rhetoric to get what they want, for themselves and their cronies. Period. That's human nature.