Sen. Norm Coleman said on the campaign trail Saturday that the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street could eventually become a boon to taxpayers and that firmer regulations might not be the answer.
A very brief look at the…
Not everyone can afford to put their money into gold bars for the duration of the current financial crisis.
And not everyone is as lucky as the guy in Wisconsin who found $1,700 that someone had…
This week in the Schultz Report, we discuss the only issue that matters at the moment–the financial meltdown on Wall Street and the Paulson plan that’s currently being bum-rushed through Congress, which would give the US Treasury secretary absolutely unprecedented power to buy up bad debt with public dollars, and without any public oversight or future public benefit in the form of equity in the companies we’re bailing out.
As if $700 billion weren’t an incomprehensible enough sum on its own, that widely repeated figure only represents Henry Paulson’s personal stash of get out of debt free cards. The total tab on the array of taxpayer-financed Wall Street bailouts presently contemplated is likely to be closer to $1.8 trillion by the reckoning of CNBC, whose highly recommended estimate includes a rundown of the additional bailout billions.
The following list of things you can buy with a trillion dollars is cadged from the invaluable Undernews. For starters, a trillion dollars is enough money to:
Buy everybody living in Los Angeles at least one Lamborghini Gallardo (pictured above; base couple starts at $186,900).
The list continues…
During the 2008 cycle, Sen. Norm Coleman has received three and a half times more in campaign contributions than Al Franken from interests in the so-called FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) sector at the heart of the continuing financial crisis–and over twice as much from the principal players in this week’s Wall Street drama.
A Knoxville, Tenn., TV station’s Web site credits Minnesota’s answer to Gov. Sarah Palin with this zinger on federal bailouts in the financial sector: “What’s next, Starbucks too big to fail?”
One problem: After all her national media face time — from the famously extended State-of-the-Nation smooch she inflicted on President Bush to yet another appearance on “Larry King Live” last night — WBIR-TV still managed to mis-ID her as “Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of New Mexico.”
Video, and more, below the jump.
The Obama campaign has released a two-minute web video in which Barack Obama speaks directly to viewers about the recent upheavals on Wall Street and his plan for stabilizing the economy. There’s a transcript below the jump.
The Federal Reserve announced Tuesday evening that it’s giving American International Group an $85 billion loan to bail out the multinational quasi-insurance and investment corporation after the company traded in unregulated credit default swaps and other risky ventures and landed at the doorstep of default. How much would that $85 billion in corporate welfare be worth to those who truly need a safety net?
After Monday’s dramatic tumble in the financial markets–led by dire announcements about Lehman Brothers (bound for bankruptcy court), Merrill Lynch (absorbed by Bank of America) and insurance giant AIG (desperately seeking bridge loans)–I got in touch with Doug Henwood for some help in sorting out these latest developments and what they augur for the US economy on Main Street.
In a 20-minute interview taped Tuesday afternoon, Henwood–the publisher of the invaluable Left Business Observer newsletter and perhaps our most plainspoken economics journalist–took the measure of “Gray Monday” and the arc of the US economy.
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