Oh, By the Way...

...the bailout bill passed the House, and was signed into law by President Bush this afternoon.

I don't know if I should be relieved or terrified.

The Bill Itself

In case you wanted to take a look at the actual bill (all 450 pages of it), here it is.

The Bailout Passes

Before it passed, I said, "I bet it passes with 3-to-1 support, if not higher."

It passed 74-25.

Ba-zing!

For the record, I don't really know how I feel about this.... because I don't know that much about economics.  Hey, just call me John McCain!

Why It Failed

Nate Silver has a good explanation as to why the bailout failed:

Among 38 incumbent congressmen in races rated "toss-up" or "lean" by Swing State Project, just 8 voted for the bailout as opposed to 30 against: a batting average of .211.

An evil, mean Nancy Pelosi?  No.  A group of politicians worried they won't be re-elected.

The Bailout Fails

So the largest bailout in American history fails to pass the House of Representatives, 228-205.  About 60% of Democrats voted for it, about 75% of Republicans voted against it.

Amazingly, the GOP is blaming the Democrats - and a supposedly mean, partisan speech by Nancy Pelosi - for the failure of the bill.  How does the party that votes "nay" by roughly 2 to 1 blame the OTHER guys for the bill's failure?

What the incident says to me is that there is no leadership among the Republicans in the House, and that apparently John McCain has no sway among his party's congressmen and women.  Remember that it was Mac who rode into Washington last week like a knight in shining armor - "suspending" his campaign in the process - to try to get House Republicans on board with the bailout.  He clearly failed - again - to show any kind of real leadership or responsibility on an urgent matter facing the country.

Paulson Pleads

Just heard this amazing anecdote on CNN Headline News:

At some point within the last 24 hours, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson actually got down on one knee and begged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to save the bailout deal.

Pelosi replied, "It's not me that's killing the deal, it's House Republicans."

She's right.

Krugman on the Crisis

Paul Krugman's op-ed in today's New York Times looks at how the government can get us out of this mess, and just how bad it is:

Thus, banks are normally able to borrow from each other at rates just slightly above the interest rate on U.S. Treasury bills.  But Thursday morning, the average interest rate on three-month interbank borrowing was 3.2 percent, while the interest rate on the corresponding Treasuries was 0.05 percent.  No, that's not a misprint.

[Emphasis mine.]  To quote almost everyone from the Star Wars canon, "I have a bad feeling about this."  But we'll see what happens.

Where's Dubya?

Just wanted to point out something that Chris Matthews harped on on Hardball last night, and that I just read in MSNBC's FirstRead blog this morning:

When we were in the run-up to the Iraq War, President Bush was everywhere, giving speeches to the country, promoting the cause with the citizenry and overall doing - at the time anyway - a pretty good job of "selling" the war.

As Alan Greenspan said, this current economic crisis is a once-in-a-century event and Bush is nowhere to be seen!  He's essentially leaving it up to Congress and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to take care of this mess.

Ugh.  I don't know why I should be surprised, after almost eight years of watching this incompetent bastard screw literally everything up.  But he is, after all, the first American President with an MBA.  You'd think he'd at least have some clue as to how to begin to solve this.

You know what?  I take that last sentence back.  I want him far away, far far far far far away from any crisis.  He's like the anti-King Midas: everything he touches turns into Iraq.

Four more months... four more months... four more months... four more months...

"Complete Meltdown"

Apparently the financial situation is deteriorating so quickly (don't know why this should come as any surprise) that it will probably cost up to $1 trillion when all is said and done to alleviate the situation.  And even then, we're not out of the woods.

Here's Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL):

I figure it will be at least half a trillion.  But if you look at what the Fed has already done [by rescuing insurance giant AIG], and the extension of power to treasury with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I believe we're talking about a trillion dollars.

And here's Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT):

...We're literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications, here and globally. ... What you heard last night is one of those rare moments - certainly rare in my experience here - was that Democrats and Republicans decided we needed to work together, quickly."

This is some crazy shit.

The Economy: It's Stupid.

I'll be the first person to admit that I'm somewhat of a simpleton when it comes to the financial crisis.  Before this week, I had never really heard of Lehman Bros. and all I knew about AIG was that Stockard Channing did the voiceovers for their commercials.  But now I know two things:

1. Wall Street - and this economy - are in serious trouble.
2. The financial industry has basically been taken over by the federal government.

This is scary on many levels.  For one thing, it seems like this problem should have been avoidable if sane, reasonable people had been in charge.  The very basic cause for what's happening is that banks and other companies loaned out lots and lots of money to people, many of whom can't afford to pay it back.  Hence, everybody's going bankrupt, and now the Fed is paying $85 billion to bail out AIG, after bailing out Bear Stearns earlier this year and letting Lehman Bros. die this week.

The past eight years, which, contrary to McCain's campaign have indeed been dominated by the Republicans, have shown us that a) you can't spend more money than ever AND lower taxes at the same time, and b) you can't deregulate the financial industry - somewhere, someone has to be looking over something!

The Republicans have made a habit of expanding government where we don't need it (spending, Iraq, Patriot Act, etc.) and cutting government where we do (not funding veterans, no oversight for Wall Street, 47 million Americans without health insurance, etc.).

I'm sure one of you out there is a Republican.  Explain to me why, after royally fucking everything over the past eight years, you deserve four more years in the White House?