BRACE BRACE BRACE
Well, should have been doing since the proverbial hit the fan.
WASHINGTON -- The House of Representatives delivered a stunning defeat to legislation designed to rescue the nation's troubled financial system, sweeping aside a call from President Bush to "send a strong signal" of confidence to markets at home and abroad.
The 228-205 vote Monday exposed deep unease among rank-and-file lawmakers in both parties with what would be an unprecedented intervention in the private sector. The vote came as turmoil in financial markets widened, prompting the Federal Reserve to inject new capital into credit markets and forcing the government-arranged sale of Wachovia Corp. to Citigroup.
Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 777.68 points, its biggest one-day drop in history. It ended down 7% at 10365.45, down 9.3% since crisis erupted a few weeks ago on Wall Street following the meltdown of Lehman Brothers Holdings. All 30 of the blue-chip indicator's components fell Monday.
2 comments:
Are bad loans to US 'minorities' to blame? Not directly as it turns out.
A comment here:
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2008/09/financial_risk.html
Says:
"The analysis that blames all this on CRA is fair - up to a point. But the underperforming loans are not primarily in low-income or minority areas - quite the opposite. The problems are in places where sub-prime loans were jiggered-up into instruments to allow people to ride the housing bubble - on someone else's dime. The bulk of the losses are in tony, upwardly-mobile middle-class neighborhoods where people were allowed to finance their lifestyles and/or play the property market with their equity, real or otherwise.
While there's plenty of blame to go around, there's not yet enough blame being applied to the people who took these loans so that they could play at living like a rock star, or make a quick dollar 'flipping' homes in hot markets - or to the lenders that made them the loans and then sold them on inside opaque derivative products."
This reminds me - I have an old friend who was in the 'aboriginal land rights' game in the 90's. She wanted to take a holiday, so one of the ATSIC lawyers gave her the keys to his villa in Spain. What the!!! This Spanish villa was probably paid for by taxpayer money meant for aboriginal welfare, paid instead to lawyers as exorbitant fees.
Post a Comment