none of the above (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} aisa0) wrote,@ 2008-09-29 14:47:00 |
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House rejects banking bailout
EDIT: I love this statement, fromyarrowkat: In an unprecedented act of democracy, the house jettisoned the bailout.
The house has just rejected the proposed bailout of the banking industry. I am ridiculously excited by this news. From a purely symbolic point of view, the House has just changed the rules of the game. I think there was this general feeling that the bailout, by virtue of being the first suggestion on the table, was the only option available and that we needed to move fast. Certainly I didn't invent this notion:
I haven't been able to find many statements from the house, or even check how the vote went, aside from a rough description of how the parties voted. I'm currently hoping for someone (anyone) from the House to stand up and starting speaking to the gestalt of the decision.
The stock market is, essentially, a Ponzi scheme. It is a 100 year old Ponzi scheme that has made many, many people rich, but it's still a Ponzi scheme. Chris Martenson has put together a very detailed 3 hour presentation on the topic, and if you have the time I would suggest watching it. But the short version is "the stock market (and our current financial system) relies on growth, which means exponential growth. The earth is finite, and when we run into the physical limits imposed by the earth, our financial system will be unsupportable." If for some reason you didn't have 3 hours but had 1 and a half hours, this series on the nature of exponential growth covers similar material, with fewer graphs but more rigorous (and dead simple) math.
Speaking to our current situation, we have by all appearances a banking crisis. This crisis seems to have been immediately borne out by the mortgage bubble, but structurally the situation has been building much longer. You could think of our mortgage bubble as our response to the dot-com bubble, wherein we reduced interest rates low enough to make homes seem affordable. That situation has its own causes, &c. Many of the issues that brought us here aren't limited to home mortgages. We haven't seen any news about car loan bubbles or credit card bubbles. They haven't happened yet, but we'd be foolish to think that the housing bubble couldn't portend such things. Ultimately, we have a problem with our currency--we have a problem with our debt's status in the world.
I really hope the House turns this into more than a symbolic gesture and that it opens up broader dialog on the topic. I don't think we have any control over the dollar's decline in value, but we have enormous control over how we can transition through this period.
I expect, generally, for the government to do everything it can to maintain the status quo. I'm hoping that this move will result in us looking two steps into the future instead of one, and asking how a currency crisis, not a mortgage crisis, will affect us.
EDIT: I love this statement, from
yarrowkat: In an unprecedented act of democracy, the house jettisoned the bailout.The house has just rejected the proposed bailout of the banking industry. I am ridiculously excited by this news. From a purely symbolic point of view, the House has just changed the rules of the game. I think there was this general feeling that the bailout, by virtue of being the first suggestion on the table, was the only option available and that we needed to move fast. Certainly I didn't invent this notion:
"Our time has run out," said Rep. Spencer Bachus, the ranking RepublicanThis quote seems quite silly now, as we just opened door #3.
on the House Financial Services Committee. "We're going make a decision.
There are no other choices, no other alternatives."
I haven't been able to find many statements from the house, or even check how the vote went, aside from a rough description of how the parties voted. I'm currently hoping for someone (anyone) from the House to stand up and starting speaking to the gestalt of the decision.
The stock market is, essentially, a Ponzi scheme. It is a 100 year old Ponzi scheme that has made many, many people rich, but it's still a Ponzi scheme. Chris Martenson has put together a very detailed 3 hour presentation on the topic, and if you have the time I would suggest watching it. But the short version is "the stock market (and our current financial system) relies on growth, which means exponential growth. The earth is finite, and when we run into the physical limits imposed by the earth, our financial system will be unsupportable." If for some reason you didn't have 3 hours but had 1 and a half hours, this series on the nature of exponential growth covers similar material, with fewer graphs but more rigorous (and dead simple) math.
Speaking to our current situation, we have by all appearances a banking crisis. This crisis seems to have been immediately borne out by the mortgage bubble, but structurally the situation has been building much longer. You could think of our mortgage bubble as our response to the dot-com bubble, wherein we reduced interest rates low enough to make homes seem affordable. That situation has its own causes, &c. Many of the issues that brought us here aren't limited to home mortgages. We haven't seen any news about car loan bubbles or credit card bubbles. They haven't happened yet, but we'd be foolish to think that the housing bubble couldn't portend such things. Ultimately, we have a problem with our currency--we have a problem with our debt's status in the world.
I really hope the House turns this into more than a symbolic gesture and that it opens up broader dialog on the topic. I don't think we have any control over the dollar's decline in value, but we have enormous control over how we can transition through this period.
I expect, generally, for the government to do everything it can to maintain the status quo. I'm hoping that this move will result in us looking two steps into the future instead of one, and asking how a currency crisis, not a mortgage crisis, will affect us.
