Gleaned from the twittersphere:
Dave Chen pointed me towards The Big Takeover, a great telling of the AIG story.
People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’etat. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The crisis was the coup de grace: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — “our partners in the government,” as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington’s deregulation of the Wall Street casino. “It’s all about the regulatory environment,” says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. “These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that.”
The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.
“But wait a minute,” you say to them. “No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what’s left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?”
But before you even finish saying that, they’re rolling their eyes, because You Don’t Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they’re on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.
Who is getting the bank bailout money – CNNMoney.com. Wow, $10.5Trillion so far. $35,000 from each US citizen’s pocket. To pay for years of poor decision making, greedy decision making. F%^k.
Buying Risky Assets | The Big Picture. — cogent picture explaining the program.
Ben was so right | The Big Picture. The backlash against AIG bonus backlash is in full swing. I for one am glad though that the bonus issue has exploded. While the dollars involved are not material to our country, the message and discussion about values is perhaps the most important issue to our country.
“The latest admission from the (defunct yet living) company is that well over $100 billion in taxpayer monies has gone to counter-parties at 100 cents on the dollar — no haircut, no penalty, no cost to those who made bad bets or chose their counter parties poorly. They were completely whole by Uncle Sam and the American taxpayer.” via AIG: $105 Billion to Counterparties | The Big Picture.
This is exactly what is so frustrating — these parties bear no cost of their misdeeds, we bear it all. Bailouts are dumb dumb dumb. We need to let these organizations go through bankruptcy so that all can share in the pain.
“It’s time to let the sun shine in on this mess.” via Scott Loftesness: The AIG Firestorm Spreads.
Hear hear.
The Big Picture | A Memo Found in the Street. Icahn is harsh too and advocates clawbacks. Gross willing to manage the assets for free so hopefully we don’t pay anyone a lot for this work. The longer this thing runs out, the less sympathetic I am to the bailout. And it appears Congress is not a pushover either so I guess that is good.
From Marginal Revolution: Economists Speak:
As economists, we want to express to Congress our great concern for the plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson to deal with the financial crisis. We are well aware of the difficulty of the current financial situation and we agree with the need for bold action to ensure that the financial system continues to function. We see three fatal pitfalls in the currently proposed plan:
1) Its fairness. The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers’ expense. Investors who took risks to earn profits must also bear the losses. Not every business failure carries systemic risk. The government can ensure a well-functioning financial industry, able to make new loans to creditworthy borrowers, without bailing out particular investors and institutions whose choices proved unwise.
2) Its ambiguity. Neither the mission of the new agency nor its oversight are clear. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets from troubled sellers, the terms, occasions, and methods of such purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored afterwards.
3) Its long-term effects. If the plan is enacted, its effects will be with us for a generation. For all their recent troubles, Americas dynamic and innovative private capital markets have brought the nation unparalleled prosperity. Fundamentally weakening those markets in order to calm short-run disruptions is desperately short-sighted.
For these reasons we ask Congress not to rush, to hold appropriate hearings, and to carefully consider the right course of action, and to wisely determine the future of the financial industry and the U.S. economy for years to come.
Hear hear.
On the today show, the figure $900B was thrown around as the total cost of bailouts so far (Bear, Fannie and Freddie, AIG). That is about $3,000 for every citizen of the US. Congratulations!
We entrusted the financial services sector with a big and important aspect of our economy, and we let them run it with less oversight than historically provided. And they made a hash of it, borrowing money like mad men from overseas borrowers and pouring it into ill-considered and ill-managed investments. And now we have to make the overseas borrowers whole, and it is going to fall on the backs of each of us. Many of the senior people in the financial services sector have escaped the carnage and have extracted millions from all of us.