Sunday, September 21, 2008

Mortgage Mess - Update

Sorry, because my calculator couldn't hand 700,000,000,000 I had to guesstimate and did it wrong. The number in the previous blog isn't 43,0000 times my mortgage, it's 4.3 million times my mortgage. I'm sure this will be a relief to everyone who was concerned that our government is wasting our money.

I should also add that McCain wants to create a big agency to consolidate all the other financial agencies in the country. I'm hoping he didn't get this idea from DHS, since it's well known that DHS is one of the biggest boondoggles in the history of this country and possibly has created an even greater threat to the security of this country than if it was never created. I've been to one of their buildings in DC. They have nice large TV's with video conferencing equipment in EVERY room, they also have very nice stainless steel appliances in their kitchens (I swore the counter top looked marble, but I didn't touch it, didn't want them getting my fingerprints you know). The chairs are also very very nice and comfortable $700 variety. But this is about our government wasting our money on the mortgage issue, not about them wasting our money on office furniture.

4 comments:

Amanda said...

I almost feel like we need to let these businesses fail on their own. They've self-destructed, and it's time to let them finish. Yes, we Americans would suffer, but we'll suffer whether we bail them out or not. And by letting these companies fail, it would create a good lesson to be learned by everyone involved. And that if the same kind of circumstances and policies that led the companies to fail are instituted again, perhaps people would be more likely to stand up and oppose it.

But that's just a gut reaction. I don't really know all that much about the whole mortgage mess.

Unknown said...

I think the problem is that some of the businesses are such a core to our economy that we feel we need to bolster them. I have a friend who's into something called "Resilience" the concept behind this is that you aren't dependent only any one source for anything, what we've seen is that our economy isn't as resilient as it should be.

Resilience focuses on having smaller less critical systems. These systems can feed the power grid or the economy. So instead of having some of these larger companies we should have smaller more flexible companies and less likely to cause an issue if one of them fails.

Amanda said...

That makes sense. Wouldn't having more small companies also create a better economy in that there would be more competition, and drive down prices? Kind of like the whole monopoly thing...

Unknown said...

@leopard, I agree that we need to find a way to diversify our companies. The Government does this some by offering contracts to small and minority businesses, but what ends up happening is that companies like Lockheed and BAE use the small businesses as a front to their business. In this role you have a few people in these small businesses making a lot of money and doing little work.

I think for now we need to make sure that these businesses we're bailing out don't get back into a position of being able to do what they want, I read in the Washington Post that in 2006 these firms paid out $62 Billion in bonuses. This is an unbelievalble amount of money for people who's greed lead to this fiasco.