The U.S. Senate has suddenly scheduled a vote for tomorrow night on the Wall Street bail-out plan, which has been sweetened with raising the federal insurance on bank accounts from $100,000 to $250,000, and a tax cut package. They evidently think they can get it through the Senate, which would put pressure on the House to switch at least 12 votes and pass it too.
The hope is to switch House Republicans based on the tax cuts, which the House previously rejected, and the added bank account insurance.
John McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all plan to fly to Washington and vote on the Senate floor. That alone, puts a lot of pressure on the House.
Just a whiff of the possibility of the bail-out resurrection in the Senate hit Wall Street today, and it recouped 485 points of Monday's record 755 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial average.
No one should pinch themselves yet at their good fortune. No one knows how much the bail-out will really help the economy. The tax cuts could do more than the bail-out, and anyone with $250,000 in spare cash to put in a bank account can do a whole lot better with it than leaving it in a federally-insured bank account.
The whole thing is probably smoke and mirrors. The appearance of action is more important than the action itself. Such is life.
The overwhelming hypocrisy of this whole mess still is astounding. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are at the bottom of the whole mess, quasi-government agencies that buy mortgage loans. Barney Frank, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and many others took major political contributions from the agencies, and then loosened up the lending standards and oversight, allegedly to facilitate more minority and low income homeowners.
That now these people now would be bailing-out their own incompetence and conflict of interest, defies credulity. But what can I say--welcome to Washington D.C.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment