Well it certainly looks like the banks have fucked everyone over; they’re billions in the red because of their stupidity and greed, people and businesses have no access to credit even if they can afford it and the banks are taking the hundreds of billions (coming close a trillion, A TRILLION dollars) and the banks are just taking the money and running with it. Brilliant. Its a nice note for the Bush administration to leave on: foreign policy disasters AND economic disasters, disasters abroad AND at home and all funded by tax payer money.
I have to admit I expected the banks to use the money they’re given and not lick their wounds but I must admit that I was stupid to be optimistic like that and I should’ve gone with my instincts. This is in actuality not surprising. What is surprising is that in all of this, no one asked the question as to what the banks would do with this beautiful gift from the government. I should’ve known better than to make this kind of assumption.
Since the banks aren’t doing anything with the help package, it doesn’t make things worse, it simply doesn’t change anything. They don’t deserve to be given a trillion dollars for changing nothing.
they’re billions in the red because of their stupidity and greed, people and businesses have no access to credit even if they can afford it
Oh Tyler Durden! <3
Man, there was no way this package was going to work anyway.In fact, with the way your banks were, there was pretty much nothing that could’ve been done I could think of that would’ve helped. There was just too much debt in the economy; personal, corporate and government.
I believe that the banks are a major cause of this lovely situation we’re in, but I have absolutely no sypathy for those dumb asses who chose to buy a house or take out a loan that they knew they couldn’t afford. The banks are worse for actually giving them out, but I despise those who asked for them. The banks wouldn’t need the bailout in the first place it they didn’t give out these loans.
Top execs will get $70 bn in bonuses for their work this year. I’m sure the shareholders and taxpayers who’re footing the bill will love that.
The news is that the packets of EU countries run about 1,7 trillion euros (~2, says The Guardian. The EU deficit and debt limits will be shot at least for this year. As far as I’ve read the European plans go either for bank stocks (good) or to guarantee bank loans (could turn out certainly not so good). 1,7 tn is a shitload of money that will have to be raised, managed and explained why it wasn’t put to other uses (For comparison, the EU budget is 864 billion euros).
In Greece the package is 28bn, while the government has been saying for years that they have to be tight because of EU (and all-around incompetency with finding incomes). Actually, this year’s budget that passed a few days ago counted on the EU limits being revoked and increased taxes(!). Meanwhile the banks are complaining that the terms are too steep because the government gets to participate in the board of directors, they are trying to break the common employee contracts and all this while their profits have been in the double digits for the last 7 years.
As soon as this starts having repercussions everyday people can understand, our government is crashing down. The bad, bad part is that we pay huge interests because of our 90% debt, heavily financed by what used to be cheap money and EU funds and even the 2% GNP currently projected will throw us into a vicious circle of lending.
Again, I have overestimated human intelligence. Of course, the housing market it just like the any other market in that prices go up and down based on supply and demand. Stupid me to think other people would know that.
