I'm beginning to wonder if the Wall St bail out is a good idea after all. What would happen if there was no bail out? This NY Times story from last week gives us a hint of what any bailout might be like - a gold rush for any greedy bastard who made a bad investment:
“Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.
“Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.That behaviour reminds me of our local Contact Energy getting in early and grabbing people's tax cuts in Wellington and the South island with its 11% - 12% price.
“At the same time, investment firms were jockeying to oversee all the assets that Treasury plans to take off the books of financial institutions, a role that could earn them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees.
“Nobody wants to be left out of Treasury’s proposal to buy up bad assets of financial institutions.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for deciding to share your thoughts here. In commenting on this blog, you can express any opinion you like, though any opinion expressed should make some attempt to be consistent with verifiable reality. Say what you like, confident that I won't delete any comments that are polite and respectful of me and others who may comment here. Civility aside, SPAM comments will be deleted if only because they are usually far too long and selling rubbish anyway. (Comments on posts older than 30 days are moderated. I'll approve them as soon as I can.)