In the six weeks since lawmakers approved the Treasury's massive bailout of financial firms, the government has poured money into the country's largest banks, recruited smaller banks into the program and repeatedly widened its scope to cover yet other types of businesses, from insurers to consumer lenders.Spending hundreds of billions of dollars with no oversight seems to be the hallmark of the Bush Administration. They are bringing the same competence to the financial bailout that they showed in handing out lucrative no-bid contracts to Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, Blackwater and the rest during the Iraq War.
Along the way, the Bush administration has committed $290 billion of the $700 billion rescue package.
Yet for all this activity, no formal action has been taken to fill the independent oversight posts established by Congress when it approved the bailout to prevent corruption and government waste. Nor has the first monitoring report required by lawmakers been completed, though the initial deadline has passed.
We are so screwed. The devastation the Bush Administration has wrought to the Federal budget will last for most of this century.
4 comments:
Screwed big time and don't forget the Dims once again enabled this to happen. No surprise as has any legislation been any different.
How did the Democrats enable this to happen? Do tell.
Bush is still the president and he is not going to get impeached. He knows it, so he is very comfortable with the idea of shitting out a big turn and sending it back to Capitol Hill.
Actually, this is a much better bailout than the one originally announced. Banks are the natural place to put money if you're trying to put some inflationary pressure on the economy to counter the deflationary effects of 4 *trillion* dollars of housing wealth vaporizing into thin air. Because, as Willie Sutton put it, banks are "where the money is". If you're trying to *add* money to the economy, rather than *take* it, banks and associated financial institutions are the natural place to do so, because they already have the infrastructure in place to loan it out to people and get it out into the economy and thereby use the multiplier effect to multiply its impact upon the money supply.
Now, the big problem is lack of accountability. Just handing out the money with no strings attached... how REPUBLICAN that is. But the notion of giving this money out to the institutions that can get it out into the economy... well, it beats loading up helicopters and parachuting bales of $100 bills over major cities, anyhow.
- Badtux the Economics Penguin
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