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A simple bailout plan for Wall Street and Main Street

Mitch Tuchman — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:00:00 EST

My partner Ryan Pfenninger of MarketRiders has a great grasp on the current financial crisis. Ryan believes that we should follow the lead of Sweden in the early 1990s. Let's be clear. The $700 bailout bill rejected by the House of Representatives was a disaster. Nearly every member of Congress who spoke during the debate said they disliked it, but for some reason concluded that even though it wasn't any good, they should still vote for it.

The fun didn't end there. Several members of Congress talked about how mark-to-market accounting rules are causing this mess. Instead of having banks mark a worthless asset to zero; they would rather allow a bank to carry an asset at an artificially high valuation, prolonging this crisis. Marking assets to higher valuations than they're worth does not solve the problem. It merely turns a gaping into a constant wound that will eventually cause the institution to bleed out.

Let's get real. Taxpayers don't like this deal because it bails out Wall Street and will likely not solve the problem. Shifting capital from taxpayers to banks without an actual plan to fix foreclosures and asset valuations is a net wash, not a solution.

Ryan proposes a simple solution that he believes could work:

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A simple bailout plan for Wall Street and Main Street originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Congress is screwing up -- think backstop not bailout!

Sheldon Liber — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:35:00 EST

Filed under: Major Movement, International Markets, Other Issues, Bad News, Rants and Raves, Market Matters, Money and Finance Today, Personal Finance, Politics, Presidential Elections, Headline News, Federal Reserve, Recession

If the government is finally willing to admit that we are in some deep crap and Warren Buffett is willing to make the call to arms himself, a non-Bush supporter, then the members of Congress that can't find some satisfactory compromise on the $700 billion appropriation are screwing up!

I don't care if the number is a trillion dollars at this point. The money is not a give-away if it is a loan. It may be a bailout, but it is also a backstop against further erosion of our economy.

If the value of equity in the United States, all real estate, stocks, bonds, gold, you name it is worth 100 trillion dollars (wild guess) than how much do we lose if it goes down in value like it is doing now as I type. See Flash: House rejects bailout package, market dives

Every man, woman and child in the country will lose if confidence and liquidity are not propped up. How many jobs will be lost?

Think about this, if the downward spiral is not curtailed than the amount of taxes NOT collected by the Federal Government in the next year or two will be larger than the amount of the backstop the fed is trying to create now! That alone makes the deal worth doing.

Update: The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 7% of its value today. That is in just one day! How many billions of equity is that? How much did you house go down in value today? How much less secure do you feel in your job today?

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money.

Congress is screwing up -- think backstop not bailout! originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The economic meltdown: Main Street gets mad

Gary Sattler — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:31:00 EST

Filed under: Columns, Recession, Financial Crisis

In this post, Gary E. Sattler tries to explain Main Street to Wall Street. Gary asked his friends and neighbors, took a virtual tour and asked his eBay's message board frequenters what they thought of the crisis on Wall Street and the looming economic crisis. Read what Main Street has to say.

I've spent quite a bit of time lately canvassing friends, neighbors and coworkers, to get a feel for the grassroots reaction to our current economic turmoil. I even went so far as to solicit opinions from discussion board frequenters on eBay. It's been an interesting exercise, if a bit heart wrenching and emotionally wearing. To say the least, it's been a lot less fun than going to a ball game.

A couple weeks ago, I didn't hear much spontaneous conversation about the subject. At that time, I had to solicit individual opinions. For the last week, however, it's been quite a different story. People have begun discussing their opinions on the matter in earnest. Everywhere I go, someone is talking about how disgusted they are with the current economy.

How people are feeling is best summed up in one word -- angry. That anger runs the gamut from slightly agitated to positively fuming. Each person's level of anger seems to be dependent upon their depth of understanding about what is going on, and their interpretation of how deeply it affects them personally. Generally speaking, the more they understand it, the angrier they are. Age also seems to play a significant part in determining the individual level of angst with the situation. People over 40 seem to be the most upset, while most people under 20 almost couldn't care less. This dynamic is probably best attributed to the severe beating that retirement savings have taken, the tendency for incomes to level off as we age, and an increased understanding of what a widespread economic collapse could mean to us all.

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The economic meltdown: Main Street gets mad originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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