But I commented over at Hot Air.

…Spending all this money to prevent a recession is making it worse…

… Listen, investment banks have been going bankrupt since the beginning of time. If people make mistakes — look, if you bail out every investment bank that gets in trouble, that’s not capitalism, that’s socialism for the rich”

Jim Rogers

…it looks to me like the Fed you and I will eventually become the largest mortgage lender in the history of the world.

There…fixed that.

I don’t like that kind of manipulation – smacks of old time serfdoms, where the King suggests large landowner give his prize assets to a certain “friend of the court” as a free-will gift and reward for “outstanding services to the Crown” or something or other.

I don’t like a company that will do that to another one, either.

It isn’t as if the mortgage instruments are worthless, because the holders can always and probably should foreclose on them, and the property will retain more of its value than the Stearns’ shares did!

Forcing a weekend panic sale is dirty.

Look at what the govt has done with other companies that went into bankruptcy – like all the airlines!
And let them take a year to clean up and regain their footing!

Wasn’t the govt the ones that forced some institutions to start with subprime loans so folks who wouldn’t otherwise be able to qualify, could then buy homes???
And didn’t a lot of banks squawk over the risky practices they were being bullied into taking, just at a point when the rules had finally be strengthened enough to make “sharking practices” “less profitable” to them???

On March 17th, 2008 at 9:48 am, Sean.Hackbarth said:

Essentially because an asset-rich company’s $50 shares were suddenly worthless JUST BECAUSE CREDITORS suddenly decided they’d rather back a $3 share JP MORGAN than the $50 share Bear Stearns company?

Why would cash lenders do that? Everyone admits the ASSETS were THERE! to back the ORIGINAL value of the stocks.

Plus, only a year ago, the stocks were worth close to $200 per share, If I caught Cavuto right, this afternoon???

I mean, if these were JUNK bonds, I’d understand – they all say the HARD ASSETS were there.

On March 17th, 2008 at 9:20 am, bloghooligan said:
and the alternative was….?

NEVER having taken us off the Gold (plus other precious…) Standard.

NEVER having created the Fed Reserve.

NEVER having allowed Central Banking.

NEVER having created Income taxing and the IRS.

John Adams – All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.

Thomas A. Edison – If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People.

Albert Einstein – Today’s problems cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them.

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. – Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (1742-1813)

John Adams – In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.

John Adams – Because power corrupts, society’s demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.
– Thomas Jefferson

Karl Marx – The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to Socialism.
Karl Marx- My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.

Karl Marx – The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
– Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

Ten Planks of the Communist Manifesto
(yada yada yada…)

Less risky bank and mortgage practices would have counted less on being able to confiscate all those mortgaged properties for themselves, and worried more about their own asset management – now, who really effectively owns all the property represented by those risky loans??

And what manipulation was accomplished to flip Bear Stearns so quickly – one minute an anchoring structure of Wall Street, the next, a nice little pancake breakfast for some “wise entrepeneurs”.

People watch fortunes like $300 mill disappear like paper into ash in a fire?

Wall Street stayed uneasy watching that catastropohic event take place for all of about 4 hours??????
Then go back to BAU?

I’d be scared of a run, too – and wonder who deliberately set that up!

Is that something our Founding Fathers thought was wise?

I didn’t think so.

Uncontrolled illegal immigration.

Providing mortgages to people who the lenders knew they could not afford.

Allowing the dollar to collapse.

It’s easy to say that our so-called elite (government and corporate) is stupid and/or naive. However, they wouldn’t be our so-called elite if they really were stupid and/or naive. How could smart people not have seen this coming unless there is a method to their madness?