Bailout Watch 126: GMAC: "Where's OUR Damn Bailout? Oh There It Is. Excellent!"
TTAC called this the moment we heard that Uncle Sam was allocating your taxes– I mean your children’s children’s children’s taxes– to bail out the banker boyz from the sub-prime mess they created. Still, it’s strange to hear GMAC– the lender that poured tens of billions of dollars into GM’s coffers– admit they need to suckle on the federal teat suckle on the federal teat. “GMAC has been in discussions with the government on a multidimensional level,” said GMAC spokeswoman Toni Simonetti. “We are interested in exploring options that are available to us through the federal government’s tool kit that was implemented under the new legislation.” To its credit, Automotive News [sub] asked GM’s Dr. Who fan what form this “assistance” might take. “Simonetti declined to say whether GMAC wants to sell troubled assets to the government or to sell a stake in the company to taxpayers.” Oh yeah, I want a piece of GMAC. But then I like lighting Franklins on fire. Meanwhile, “Last week, Ford Motor Credit Co. said it had registered with the Federal Reserve to participate in a new program aimed at easing the sale of commercial paper, which companies use to raise money for day-to-day operations. Ford Credit has not decided if it will take part in the program.” That’s news to me. Or, you know, not.
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Most legit studies of the Great Depression show that the reason it got as bad as it did was because so many banks were allowed to fail. The Japanese economic slump of the 90's is largely seen as a failure of the Japanese gov't to help liquidate the bad assets held in their banks. The US economic survival of the S&L crisis is credited to the gov't setup of the Resolution Trust Corporation. Economists are now saying that letting Lehman fail was probably a mistake, since they were so intertwined in the global markets. Capitalism can't run unchecked, and if it gets out of control, it can't be allowed to self-correct, because the corrections are too severe. We're supposed to learn from history, and history has taught us this lesson several times now. We can point fingers and lay blame anywhere and everywhere, but we are where we are, and if we just sit back and allow the simultaneous failure of the banking systems and our biggest corporations, saying things like "I didn't cause this mess, why should my taxpayer dollars pay for it..." then you won't have to worry long, because soon you won't have a job either, and so you won't have to pay any taxes. The guy who owns the barber shop on the corner and thinks he's insulated from all this is in for a surprise when the small company down the street that supplies blank circuit boards to Delphi to put in controllers to sell to GM goes out of business, and all those ex-workers figure out how to cut their own hair. Then the barber and a bazillion folks like him don't go Christmas shopping and retail businesses start to fail. Yep...we'd recover, eventually, but it might take 20 years (it took Japan about 15 years, the Great Depression lasted 10 and ended with the WWII war economy). My Grandmother used to tell me stories about how there was no way you'd pass a penny that someone had dropped on the street without picking it up. Personally, I don't want to go there. And if I magically escaped the worst of it, I don't want my friends and relatives to go there either. We can sit back in our armchairs and call all the economists that are struggling with this thing a bunch of idiots, but I don't believe that. These are smart people or they wouldn't have gotten where they are. They've been studying economies all their lives. Bernanke is an expert in the Great Depression. I am, at the very least, willing to concede that they are smarter at how to prop up the economy than I am. And what I've heard makes sense to me...based on my limited understanding of history (see paragraph 1).
Hope you're right MichaelJ. Unfortunately I think that even if you are then we're still in deep doo doo because we're just about to elect another Hoover or FDR (author of the 3rd coup - when he illegally confiscated all gold from US citizens within 2 weeks of gaining office in 1933). Both were excessively into interventionist maneuvers. Go back to root causes; 1913, when the 2nd coup happened and the then government (Congress and President too) allowed bankers to essentially take control of our country. It's called "The Federal Reserve" and it is - neither. Now let's go back to near the beginning*. Here I will quote the United States Constitution, Article I, Section 10. "No State Shall... Make Anything But Gold and Silver Coin a Tender In Payment of Debt." Understand the underlying problem now? Without fakey-do money totally being manipulated, the usual AND NORMAL business cycles (including what used to be called "depressions" now PC'd into "recessions") lasted no more than a few years and cleared the decks of the bad operators, allowing fresh businesses to flourish. Nowadays we have got total manipulation and a "currency" based upon nothing more than lies, rather than real money ("coin"). Until we fix that problem, nothing will be fixed. Putting it another way, doing more of the same is not going to fix the problem but only continue to make it worse, when the reckoning comes finally. But since all of about 2-3% of the U.S. population believes this at this time (i.e. Libertarians and Constitutionalists, as well as disenfranchised Ron Paul voters) we're going to be in the economic wilderness for some time. Possibly forever. As in, that's how it went for the Roman Empire. The last Caesars debased their currency, too. Look where it got them. Into the history books. * the actual beginning of our nation was in 1776, not 1789, with President Washington. Who, in fact, was the FIRST President of the Colonies which made up the breakaway United States? He was a devout Lutheran, Peyton Randolph, and he served from 1776-1777 and then served another 1 year term later. Why is this important? Because, 1789 was the "first coup" of sorts. Because, you see, devout Lutherans cannot be Masons. How many Lutheran Presidents of the U.S. have there been since 1789? With Lutherans making up about 1/4th of the U.S. population, mind you? 1/4 of them? 1/8th? 1/16th? 1/32? Nope. NONE. Can't be Masons and Lutheran, you see. . . hmmm, it's only a "coincidence" right? Until you realize how many Presidents have been Masons. Virtually all of them. As well as members of Congress - a huge majority of them. Interesting.....
@ menno: I knew it! Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We do! We do! Who leaves Atlantis off the maps? Who keeps the Martians under wraps? We do! We do! Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star? We do! We do! Who robs cavefish of their sight? Who rigs every Oscar night? We do! We do!
Well, guyincognito, it "could" all be simply a co-inky-dink about the Masons / Lutheran thing, but suffice to say that devout Catholics, devout Baptists and many other Christian traditions, escew being Masons. We've had just exactly ONE Catholic President (Kennedy; assassinated - "coincidentally" a few weeks after he stepped in and tried to take back the printing of money away from the Federal Reserve), and I believe we've had one Southern Baptist President, Carter, arguably one of the worst in the history of our nation, and he was not a Mason. The Masons are awfully proud of their record of how many of their brotherhood have been in positions of power. http://www.calodges.org/no406/FAMASONS.HTM Stepping back and looking at the big picture, you "might" just start to see a pattern, here. I'm not even saying there's a back-room conspiracy per se. It's just that the rich & powerful always want to do what the rich & powerful want to do, and that is exclude the not rich & powerful. For goodness sake, just look at the 0.7 Trillon Dollar Bail Out For The Wealthy Bankers, the 0.63 Trillion Dollar "Liquid" Bail Out which happened the day after the Senate failed to pass the 0.7 Trillion (then adding 0.15 Trillion of pork to it and passing it only days later). Our children and grand children are going to hate our memory for all of this, from their mud huts.