bailouts

  • bailouts,  Economics,  Megan McArdle

    An interesting thought

    Via Megan McArdle – I’m not for this, but it would solve the problem.

    My lunatic proposal for the day: why not make it easier to move homeowners out of homes they can’t afford? Set up a streamlined foreclosure proceeding where a current or mildly delinquent homeowner can simply give the house to the bank and walk away. Do this with two legal provisos:

    1. No tax on the forgiven loan

    2. No black mark on the credit record. The bank marks the loan as fully satisfied.

    Of course, if we decide to actually “fix” the problem we should loosen immigration and get people actually in the vacant houses.

  • Atlanta,  bailouts,  Politics

    I hold my nose

    I hold my nose, club my conscience, and smother my scruples and voted for Chambliss today. Barr’s suggestion was important to me, enough to get me over my outrage at his campaign literature mentioning “Fiscal Responsibility”.

    Incidentally my polling place was deserted, which points to a substantial win for Chambliss.

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  • bailouts,  Funny,  Obama

    Making little rocks out of big rocks

    Sorry for the dreadfully light blogging lately – for the record, here is a short summation of my thoughts lately.

    • Bush will issue between 150-200 pardons between now and when he leaves office
    • I’m still furious about the bailouts
    • I think my initial view of Obama, as being an excellent figurehead, with no fixed ideology, is coming into sharper focus.
    • And this is the funniest commentary on the bailouts I’ve seen yet. It’s a good indicator that popular opposition remains strong.
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  • Atlanta,  bailouts,  Ormewood,  Rocksploitation

    Saturday night special

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  • bailouts,  Education,  McCain,  Obama

    4 things

    • Wilkerson pegs the lack of ideology with McCain and Obama with

      McCain doctrine and Obama doctrine for use of force in humanitarian situations: Obama: There might be moral issues at stake. Surely we should stop Holocaust. Rwanda. Standing idly by diminishes us. Basically, I have no principle. I leave it at the discretion of my evolved moral intuition.

      Why do we have to guess what these people want to do?

    • This graphic gets it right
    • Death to the Four Year Degree – I’ve felt this way for a while actually.
    • And we need this guy back again
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  • Abortion,  bailouts,  McCain,  Obama,  Politics

    Friday link clearing

    Since these have been piling up in Firefox, here’s what I’ve been reading

    • Obama and the Born-Alive issue – ghoulish stuff. The controversy of abortion is where one draws the line on person vs potential person. Even the most ardent pro-choicers seem to draw it at birth, but it seems not everyone does.
    • Via Will Wilkerson

      Obama terrifies me: an intelligent, thoughtful, well-prepared, capably extemporaneous man ascribing a future holocaust to some sort of non-existent, fantastical, steroidal Iran; talking about unsanctioned cross-border incursions into Pakistan because we found bin Laden, or some such, and must “take him out”; warbling around about “main street” while, in a lawerly, circumlocutory way signaling that he’s ultimately going to get behind hundred-billion-dollar cash bailouts to institutions that ought to be dismantled, destroyed, scattered to the wind. He wants GM to make electric cars. He wants the American people to know that he will appear before them to make extravagant xenophobic declarations in order to assuage their insecurity about the rise of other competing economies. He does this all in a calm, perfectly reasonable manner, with a convincing boardroom demeanor, and judging by the reactions of my liberal friends, with whom I listened, this was basically pleasing to them.

      McCain is of course out of his mind: forgetful, vicious, reactionary. And his ideas are even crazier than BO’s, but there’s a certain comfort in the fact that their insanity is laid so plainly and mercilessly bare by the grinning psychopath’s delivery. He provides no quarter for those who want to convince themselves that by Killing People for Their Own Good we are not actually killing them, or that by suborning corporate malfeasance we are combating it, or that by desperately seeking to maintain the geography of radial sprawl and the automobile we are seeking “energy independence.”

      I’ve had the thought lately regarding McCain, Bush, and bailouts – if we’re going to have corporate socialism shouldn’t we have a Democrat do it? At least they don’t have the supposed association with the free market that Republicans do.

    • David Friedman on the bailout

      The failure of a firm doesn’t wipe out wealth, except to the extent that the firm itself—its firm culture, web of relationships and such—has some value. When a firm fails, that is at least some evidence that that value was negative, which is why nobody chose to buy out the firm and keep it going. The ordinary assets of the firm—its buildings, land, stocks, bonds, mortgages, and whatever it owns—don’t vanish when the firm fails, they get sold to someone else.

      The bailout is not a way of preventing the loss of value. The loss (or transfer) of value occurred when people made bad mortgage loans. What happened more recently was the recognition of that loss. All the bailout can do is to shift the loss from some people to others, from the stockholders and creditors of firms that are now effectively bankrupt to the taxpayers.

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