horse of george

"... my impression of the state of the economy and the Obama administration's attempts to rescue it... I say impression because as a novitiate in these matters I can't really know, per se... I only have a sense of things... much like a person watching a play from a great distance through a telescope, you can make out the actions and interactions, watch lips move, eyes narrow and brows furrow, but for all that only hazard a guess as to what the damn thing's about... and I would guess this: that at least seventy-five percent of the stimulus plan is a waste of money doomed in the long run to do more harm than good and that will be paid for in part by taking money away from the military, with the effects of which no doubt fated to come back and haunt; that it's foolish to keep the housing market artificially inflated by trying to save the mortgages of people who can't really afford them - I don't see how trying to slow the release of noxious gas from the housing bubble makes any sense... I mean I see how declining values can have a cancerous effect on other values and increase toxicity of assets already toxic enough... still, I don't see how government can ad hoc fix housing prices that will be viewed as legitimate by the market or legitimately arbitrate whose mortgage is worth saving and whose isn't... you're telling me the government is going to tell some poor black family they have to move back to the projects because in objective terms they can't really afford the house they we're duped into buying?... no fucking way... although, if the government ends up taking over the banks in whole or part they'll end up owning the CDOs which means they'll end up owning the mortages anyway which means... I don't know what the fuck it means... ; that, despite the importance of trying to stem the rising unemployment tide, GM and Chrysler should be allowed to fail, declare bankruptcy and begin again within the context of much more viable business models - throwing money at them is akin to tossing good meat to a sick bear chained in your backyard so one day it can get just healthy enough to wriggle free and eat you; that when you get right down to essentials all that really matters is bringing the banking system back to life and that the only way to do that is to kill the bad banks off or kill off the bad assets weighing them down... no idea how you do that but the slow creep of an inevitable nationalization, which seems to be the case now, is decidedly not the answer... if certain banks have to fall let them fall - otherwise spell out the methodology for getting toxic assets off the books... Bernake states that Geitner's plan will work but they've been so laggard in releasing details about how it will work one begins to wonder if maybe they don't know!... anyway, anyway... whatever happens it will be painful, no doubt very painful... but one gets the feeling that too much of what Obama and the democrats are proposing sounds like the spin of people who have ulterior motives trying to convince us that it doesn't have to be so depressingly painful after all... but I think it does and misguided attempts to avoid that reality will just make things worse... true, Obama is on the one hand talking about hardship and travails etc etc - but then with the other hand he's throwing out inchoate trillion dollar promises of salvation, creating an environment of dread and uncertainty and suspicion that has pissed off Wall Street and done little to raise prospects on Main... or so goes the impression I'm getting..."