Family Guy

Insane?  

No, of course not.  

You and I are now 79.9% owners of a New York-based insurer.  Haven’t you been itching to add an insurer to your portfolio?  It is a fine supplement to the real estate mortgages we bought a week and a half-ago.

I’ll bet you thought that nationalizing large segments of the marketplace was difficult didn’t you?

Gas Pains

Tom, when can we nationalize GM.  I always wanted a Corvette:)

Peter...

Be careful what you ask for.

Chrysler got a bail-out you know.

Gotta wonder how all this is going to get paid-for.

A trillion here, a trillion there.  Pretty soon we might be talking about real money, eh?

Gas Pains

Ironic that folks accuse Obama of being a socialist when it's Bush's administration that's putting these big corporations into the hands of the people.  

AIG insures corp bonds.  I heard something like $80 Trillion.

Does anyone know what bigger that a Trillion?

Howard Fineman of Newsweek....

"So I was taken aback the other night by how vehement and shaken Conrad seemed (I've known him for 20 years; I can detect such things).

As chairman of the Budget Committee (and ranking member on Finance as well), Conrad is plugged into the socket of the credit crisis. When I saw him he'd just been briefed—and shocked—by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.

The two men had told him that, if the government had not taken over AIG Insurance, the entire economy of the United States, and much of the rest of the world, could have fallen into deep panic. Like an aggressive tumor, AIG's unsustainable insurance guarantees were spread like poisonous filigree not just in hedge funds, brokerage houses and banks, but also on the books of blue-chip corporations atop the Fortune 500. "Some very big names were in danger," he said.

"They had to do what they did," Conrad explained to me. "No choice." And as we have since learned, the takeover of AIG was not enough to calm the markets. Indeed, it seemed to have had the opposite effect.

Where the Democrats blameless?

Of course they weren't. Even Democrats in the room admitted it.

The bipartisan consensus was that the festival of dangerous greed began in the Clinton 90s. Democrats, abandoning their union and working-class skepticism of the markets, threw in with a new crowd of pro-business, pro-deregulation donors. Also, they countenanced an anything-goes mentality at what became the party's favorite new social-uplift tools, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two behemoths papered the planet with cheap (and, as we now see, shaky) home mortgages, with the whole process run (and protected) by a get-rich-quick cadre of political hacks.

But the consensus in the room also was that the sordid history didn't contain enough anti-Democratic ammunition to do McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin that much good.

In politics as in baseball, fans—voters—focus on what happens in the ninth inning, not the first. The Democrats whiffed on the credit crisis in the early years, but now they aren't at bat. It was President George W. Bush who nominated Paulson and Bernanke. If they strike out, it's the GOP that will lose the game.

Or so Obama has calculated, as he coolly waits for the next big wave."

I myself am against these bailouts.  The market must rid itself of companies that cannot stand on their own business plan and make a profit.  By the simple fact that you are against these bailouts, you must also be a conservative.  Welcome.

I myself am against these bailouts.  The market must rid itself of companies that cannot stand on their own business plan and make a profit.  By the simple fact that you are against these bailouts, you must also be a conservative.  Welcome.