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Loading ...Bailout bill defeated, stocks plunge
09.29.2008 2:34pm EDT
(Washington) The House on Monday defeated a $700 billion emergency rescue package, ignoring urgent pleas from President Bush and bipartisan congressional leaders to quickly bail out the staggering financial industry.
Stocks plummeted on Wall Street even before the 228-205 vote to reject the bill was announced on the House floor.When the critical vote was tallied, too few members of the House were willing to support the unpopular measure with elections just five weeks away. Ample no votes came from both the Democratic and Republican sides of the aisle.
Bush and a host of leading congressional figures had implored the lawmakers to pass the legislation despite howls of protest from their constituents back home.
The vote had been preceded by unusually aggressive White House lobbying, and spokesman Tony Fratto said that Bush had used a “call list” of people he wanted to persuade to vote yes as late as just a short time before the vote.
Lawmakers shouted news of the plummeting Dow Jones average as lawmakers crowded on the House floor during the drawn-out and tense call of the roll, which dragged on for roughly 40 minutes as leaders on both sides scrambled to corral enough of their rank-and-file members to support the deeply unpopular measure.
They found only two.
Bush and his economic advisers, as well as congressional leaders in both parties had argued the plan was vital to insulating ordinary Americans from the effects of Wall Street’s bad bets. The version that was up for vote Monday was the product of marathon closed-door negotiations on Capitol Hill over the weekend.
“We’re all worried about losing our jobs,” Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., declared in an impassioned speech in support of the bill before the vote. “Most of us say, ‘I want this thing to pass, but I want you to vote for it - not me.’ ”
With their dire warnings of impending economic doom and their sweeping request for unprecedented sums of money and authority to bail out cash-starved financial firms, Bush and his economic chiefs have focused the attention of world markets on Congress, Ryan added.
“We’re in this moment, and if we fail to do the right thing, Heaven help us,” he said.
I am against the bailout. I am against golden parachutes. Let it be known that this was caused by the Republicans and their greedy evil ways.
We need to quit living on credit.
Spend the money on creating jobs, not insolvent and matter-less paper!
Can someone explain to me why Pelosi was so thrilled to jump on Bush’s bailout? I understand that something has to be done, and we really have no choice (cornered), but why be so SURE and “GLAD” to help Bush out???! Damn, I hope Cindy Shehan wins Pelosi’s seat!! I just think she is a coward. I have been angry from the beginning of this CRISIS that has been coming for MONTHS!!
Opininator: People want credit. Businesses want credit. If you choose to not use credit that is your choice, but it is not your place in society to tell other people that they are not allowed to make use of it.
You may not like the idea of a bailout (and neither do I), but unless you want to create another great depression, you really can’t honestly stand in opposition to it.
90 years ago, Americans were assured that something like the Great Depression would never happen again. Regulations were put in place to prevent it. Since the Rethugnantclone Uprising, they have chipped away at those regs with hammer and tongs. Now they are reaping the whirlwind. Let ‘em, and all the greedy executives and real estate agents and developers and speculators with them.
Bud Clark
San Diego CA USA
This is caused by socialism not the free market. This can be traced back to the amendments to Community Redevelopment act Which forced lenders to make high risk loans.
So anyone that blames this on the free market would not know a free market if it hit them in their a$$
Pat Pelosi jumped on this because it would help socialize even more of the once free market.
Bud it is unfair and pure intellectual dishonesty to blame any one political party for this. The eponymous of this problem is the Amendment to the Community Redevelopment act which made lenders give high risk loans. Also, you have to blame those individuals that acted irresponsibly by offering loans to those that cannot afford to repay them and those individuals that agreed to accept said loans. The blame is squarely on the shoulders of the irresponsible people involved including those loosing their homes.
No, there is enough blame to go around. Yes, the “Community Redevelopment Act” holds a lot of blame, but mortgage companies made their own bad bets, as well. I remember before I purchased my last house, most every mortgage broker I spoke with wanted to loan me double what I was comfortable with. I explained that I wanted a simple 30 year fixed and they attempted to sell me interest only loans and a variety of other unsound financing schemes. This issue is solely on the part of banks wanting to turn a quick buck.
A bi-partisan coalition in Congress actually doing what the American people - and not their corporate donors - want. Have I died and gone to a parallel universe?
This is a fantastic result for democracy. No more corporate free rides. Wall Street bankers got themselves into this mess. They can get themselves out of it too. These morons apparently haven’t learned anything from the dotcom bust. They’re still betting on limitless growth (this time in real estate). And once again, when things go wrong, they expect taxpayers to fund their risky behavior.
Bud: Not all regulations are good. Some regulations have absolutely no purpose other than to achieve some tiny benefit at an exorbitant cost. It is those regulations that any conservative, indeed any rationally-minded human being, would oppose. It is also those that the de-regulators have had the greatest success in eliminating as you can prove with science that the regulations in question are useless.
The issues that are presently of interest are matters that were not regulated to begin with. It’s not as though regulations in this area were put in place and then removed later by the de-regulation movement.
John: Say that again when it’s your bank that folds and your life savings that is lost. This isn’t about big bankers not getting their paycheck; it’s about lower and middle-class people not being able to buy homes, losing their savings and not being able to retire because their retirement evaporated due to a bank or investment bust.
Don’t let your anti-establishment biases prevent you from seeing all the people that will be harmed if society does nothing to bail out these banks because you and others holding the same opinion think naively that it won’t affect normal people.
Trace you are partially right and I agree lenders are part of the problem but you also have to hold those accountable that accepted the loans that you were wise enough to forgo.
Kari you do make some good points but you statement about loosing life savings I disagree with because of FDIC. Many retirement accounts like 401 K’s will take a beating but stocks rebound (as a whole). The major problem is going to be getting credit and that is a good thing at this point in time. We as a nation have to much debt both personal (nation as a whole) and Politically (national deficit).
Censoredagain: The FDIC wasn’t designed to insure for the catostrophic failure of the banking system. The government doesn’t have the unlimited money that would be necessary to give $100,000 checks to anyone and everyone who lost their savings.
Kari,
That’s the entire point. If you’re lower class and making $20,000 a year — nobody should’ve given you a $350,000 loan to buy a house in the first place. There are several reasons why common sense has been abandoned. However, one of those reasons is greed. Both on the part of the person applying for such a loan (knowing that have no way of paying it back). And the bank that gave it to them (risking long-term stability for short-term gains).
By giving loans to low income people who shouldn’t get one, the bank can craft deals that will result in higher interest for them only a period of 30-50 years. If a person defaults, the bank was also betting on the use of their real estate as collateral. Since the real estate market was going up at the time, nobody seemed to have a problem with any of this. But now that the housing slump has made it impossible for them to recover that bad debt, they’re panicking. This collaspe has more to do with the panic than any actual losses these banks have incurred. In fact, other than negative projections and admittedly troubling trends, very little has actually “happened” with these properties. They’re still sitting there. And the bank vaults are still full. But Wall Street wants Uncle Bush and Grandma Pelosi to charge to their rescue anyway, so they can “retire,” take the bonuses, and run off to the Bahamas (and incidently, let the federal government deal with the consequences).
OK, obviously some of you are too young to remember what the Reaganites did in the 1980’s. We had lived from the 1930’s to the 1980’s under a great deal of Democratic imposed regulations. These regulations were designed to keep greedy “Big Business” in check. The Great Depression of the 1930’s was a direct result of the manipulation of the stock markets because of the Big Business monopolies breakups from the previous few decades. In 1929, the stock market fell about 30% and rebounded somewhat, but it was not a sudden collapse as many may think. It was a spiral. Now does that sound familiar to today?
Anyway, the Republicans saw many opportunities in the 1980’s, but were bound by many regulations from the 1890’s and 1930’s. So, they passed laws to remove regulations, and even decided to allow the re-conglomeration of previous break-ups such as the once giant AT&T telephone company, previously broken into 7 Baby Bells, now called Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, amongst others. AT&T recently merged with Cingular, remember? And AT&T is now the largest phone company, once again. They also removed regulations on the national and international transportation companies such as buses and airline companies, and they were allowed to conglomerate into companies that were akin to the monopolies prior to Sherman Antitrust Act. Remember the Microsoft lawsuits! Anyway, in the 1980’s, many smaller companies went out of business because they were either swallowed by their larger competitors or could not compete due to price fixing or product dumping.
The Reaganites let businesses out of “regulation jail”. But still the banking industry was considered hands-off because too many people still remembered the Great Depression. That is, until GWB and Cheney came to power. These last 8 years of deregulation of many industries, including the energy companies (remember Enron), telecommunications companies and non-banking banks, and the creation of new non-regulated money-making products allowed the greedy companies (please read this as greedy executives) to begin manipulating the users’ assets once again, and set up unfathomable golden parachute retirements, amongst other bad deals.
They continue to run rough shod over the investors and taxpayers, and they gave squandered the money held in trust for the people. These Republicans have created new outlets for spending money, but have “carefully manipulated” the markets to only spend it with the companies, and people, whom they personally favor. I guess you remember all of the recent Bush administration “no bid” contracts to friends that have had to be let again. There are many no-bid contracts that the Government Services Administration (GSA) have said were illegal.
You see, all this favoritism and deregulation has been to move the money from housing, the banks, investors and taxpayers into the hands of those they favor, and who are, by the way, already filthy rich and have similar philosophical ideals. No matter how incompetent and stupid, birds of a feather still flock together.
This financial debacle has been manufactured by the Bush administration. Even the Secretary of the Treasurer, the Federal Reserve Chairman and the SEC Chairman have admitted TODAY to not using any of their “tools” to stave off this problem. Bush, Cheney and these other administrators simply want all the available money the U.S. Government can generate to be passed on to them, free of charge, unregulated and with no oversight. They do not want to solve this financial problem, because once they have the money, they could care less what happens to the rest of us, now or in our retirement.
They do have another agenda. If you want to know, take a look at the world’s largest mercenary military which is now the private and secretive company, Blackwater Worldwide, which is headquartered in North Carolina, and is controlled by people from the radical religious right. It is not too much different from Hezbollah or Hamas which are based in Islam; rather it is just based in Evangelical Christianity and house in the U.S. These “worldwide” organizations, like many gigantic corporations are “international” and work above the laws of any one country. We need to be very afraid of them. They may start wars to simply get their “riches”, much as a blackmailer does. And who knows what they plan or may do. I am sure they are planning for the day of Armageddon and the End of Days, even to the extent of making it happen.
As once the tyrannical Catholic theocracy was supplanted in the 1500’s by the tyrannical monarchy, and the tyrannical monarchy supplanted by the democratic government in the 1800’s, now in the 2000’s, the democratic government will be supplanted by overlaid tyrannical worldwide corporations. You can count on it! Be very afraid!
John: I’m not disputing that a $20,000/year worker should never have been loaned money to buy a house, at least not a house of that value. I’m also not disputing the point about greed.
The value of real estate in the United States, conspicuously, has never gone down until very recently. The value has always risen with time, and this invariably resulted in people in the finance sector just taking as a given that real estate was a safe place to put their money.
“This collaspe has more to do with the panic than any actual losses these banks have incurred.”
If there are a lot of people in default and the bank cannot recover the value of the loan, by definition they lose money. It also shuts off or decreases cash flows, which can be disasterous to an operating business. Larger businesses, especially financial companies, don’t start out the year with a wad of cash and then spend it hoping for a profit. They very carefully manage their sources and uses of money so that they only have a small amount “in the bank” (no pun intended) at any given time.
If you have a massive number of defaults, even if you have a lot of assets you have no cash. If you have no cash you can’t pay your employees. And if you can’t pay your employees they leave and you don’t have a company anymore so much as a collection of stuff in a building.
The bank vaults are never ‘full’, at least not in the sense that you’d imagine. The Fed does require a certain percentage of banked funds be kept on hand at any given time, but that percentage isn’t anywhere close to 100%. (If I recall correctly, it’s currently 15%-20%.)
That said, not all of thse companies that could potentially fail were members of the Fed anyway, as they aren’t the sort of companies that would qualify for Fed membership.
Opinionator: You seem to have this naive notion that all of the regulations imposed in the last century were in fact good. “Regulations are good” is not science and certainly not an empirical fact. (Incidentally, the actual empirical fact is that some regulations are good and others are not good.)
Your complaints about the lack of effective enforcement of existing regulations have little to do with the issue of regulations. The terms to the United States Code added by the Sherman and other Antitrust Acts that Congress has passed are still in force. However, the enforcement mechanism of federal law is the Department of Justice, and prosecuting large companies is expensive, time-consuming, and if the court rules that the company isn’t a monopolist the taxpayers are out the cost of the lawsuit.
Your complaint about Enron likewise is nonsensical. There are regulations in place to preevtn the sort of behavior Enron engaged in as well as a generally accepted code of ethics among accountants. Enron, however, chose to find loopholes to circumvent all of those regulations and say that it made exorbitant amounts of money when if you worked in the accounting division there you knew it hadn’t.
The appropriate policy response to this is probably to introduce additional regulations, which it did (the Sarbanes-Oxley Act being a notable bill that was passed, but changes to the code of federal regulations occurred as well).
Likewise, your complaints of political corruption in the form of no-bid loans attempts, poorly, to tie your naive market woes into the political system.
I’m not disputing any of what you’re complaining about, but your argument that these things are magically connected when none of them have anything to do with each other simply indicates that you don’t understand politics.
If you look at corporate CEOs, you’ll find democrats as well as republicans present. The good old boy network is not a partisan thing. Not all of the rich people in the US are Republicans (in fact, I’d wager most are democrats).
The administration members not using their ‘tools’ is unquestionably at the advice of real economists (i.e. not you) with more data than I have in front of me. They have better data, and I defer to their judgement.
And FYI, the Fed chairman doesn’t work for the administration. He’s technically a member of it, but they don’t pay him, can’t fire him and for all intents and purposes he’s a separate entity. The Treasury Department and the SEC
I’m going to ignore the rest of your rant. It’s too infantile to give any serious thought to.