All About the Economy

[jensaltmann]

How does it affect you?

Does it affect you?

Can anyone with more economic savy than I have explain to me why the bailout packages have to be in the form of gifts to the banks, instead of in the form of loans that they'll have to pay back with interest once they're recovered from the mess they themselves created?

[Anders]

I don't think it affects me directly, except through the stock market - I don't have much money there, but what I have is probably worth far less by now.

In most of the bailouts I have heard about the government doesn't just give out the money, but take big ownership shares in the banks and other institutions they help. The latest I heard of was from the UK, where the government took a 70% share of some bank or something they helped.

That's how we did it here in Sweden back in the early nineties, and from what I've heard the government (i.e., we taxpayers) made the money back with interest.

I don't know the details of the US package, but just that it took an extra $150,000,000,000 in money for unrelated things to even get it to pass is frightening. (Well, that's according to the Daily Show.)

[jbhelfrich]

There's been enough pushback on the initial plan of buying the bad loan paper that it seems to be shifting to a slightly more acceptable plan of the governments buying special stock offerings of the various banks, and literally investing cash in them Still not ideal, but better.

As for its effect on me, I work in web based retail selling over priced feel-good stuff to the well of yuppie children of the hippies. I'm just hoping my company keeps enough jobs to keep me around.

[jarddavis]

I do IT for network of Cancer Clinics. A clinic which after 5 years of growth is starting to cut back. Why? Besides medicare reimbursements being cut, people have less money to pay their bills. And cancer care is expensive.

I fell like I'm walking on egg-shells lately.

I realized the other day that at this point in time, I make more money than my Dad ever made in his life on a per hour basis. And I barely make it from paycheck to paycheck.

He was able to support a wife and six of ten kids in 1974. Buy a new house. Own a car a sail boat.

Of course, he paid $.60 for a gallon of gas. I pay Over $3.00 per gallon.

I'm lucky if I don't eat baloney sandwiches for breakfast lunch and dinner some weeks.

[K-Box]

As I noted in another thread, I narrowly avoided getting laid off myself just a week or so ago.

On that note, a related editorial:

There's a reason why comic book writer Steven Grant once wrote his opinion columns under the heading "Master of the Obvious," and it's NOT because he's a dumb guy.

On the contrary, Grant's thoughts on politics and culture are so frequently astute, at pointing out truths that I'm ashamed in retrospect at not recognizing as self-evident before he mentions them, that I vastly prefer them to his paid comic book writing (sorry, Steven).

This week's "Permanent Damage" column by Grant on CBR is no exception, as he points out the stunning irony of Bush's final legacy ...

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Comic Book Resources: Permanent Damage

Contrary to popular belief, Karl Marx wasn't anti-capitalist. In the Marxist scheme, capitalism was an important step in a society's development, especially in the course of industrialization, which he proposed as a necessary component to a successful Communist state. But capitalism, according to Marx, would collapse from the weight of its inherent contradictions, and the society that would emerge from the collapse would be communist. A couple of weeks ago, capitalism seemed to have collapsed, and this week ... well, if you look at it from one angle, the Ghost [Grant's nickname for Bush] is privatizing a lot more public money by shoving it into the banking system. But from another angle, with the government buying equity in banks, doesn't it seem a lot like the first step to nationalizing the banking system? Or internationalizing it, if nations keep working together. And a friend mentioned tonight how strange it is that Russia and China now have the strongest economies on the planet ...

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So, congratulations, Comrade Bush, for losing the Cold War that your father credited himself with winning. Is there ANYTHING that your dad did that you can't manage to fuck up?