Bail outs are good?

Our corrupt system of banks, insurers and other banking "services" don't produce anything at all. As far as I can tell the banking system is only good at producing more debt for the future. I realize that all the bailouts are going to do is put off the inevitable crash for just a bit longer, but it really pisses me off that these businesses are being bailed out when new laws were passed making it harder for individuals to declare bankruptcy. Let's make all of these failing companies jump through the same hoops that individuals have to with the new bankruptcy laws. Make these companies work out a payment plan with everyone that they owe money to for the next 3 years and attend debt counseling - before they even qualify for bankruptcy. Then let them keep 1 car worth less than $2,500.00, some clothes and less than $200 in any bank accounts. Then kick them to the curb and ruin their credit for 8+ years making it impossible for them to just switch company names and resume business. That would make me feel a bit better about my dollar slowly buying less and less - if at least I knew that these multi-billion dollar corporate heads would have the same crappy IOU's from the government that I do... In fact - that might be your answer - strip them of everything but dollars - no other assets allowed. Then perhaps they'd be more likely to protect the value of the dollar instead of pushing credit (AKA debt) as the new money.

Not one product is produced in this country by banks, mortgage lenders or insurance companies. Their job (as far as I can tell) is to sing a siren song of wealth, opportunity and security to the middle class while slowly eroding the value of the dollar and shifting funds to the most wealthy 5%. Whoever got the biggest payrolls and made the decision to print more money to fund the housing boom should be paying the ultimate price right now. Unfortunately, the golden parachutes have already been deployed and the only news will be about how the economy (AKA the rest of the working class) will pay the price for them. Watch as your savings, retirements & property values get sucked in by the perfect economic black hole. If you are on the upper end of the income spectrum, you might be able to weather the coming crisis for a decade or more, but for the rest of us - even those of us that saw this coming years ago - we'll be making hard decisions and learning to *do without* more and more frequently until this corrupt system of banks and insurance companies finally get stuck with their own worthless paper.

The good news. The bailouts can't outlast the greed. Sometime down the road someone will cry out "the emperor has no clothes" and a house will just be a house on a piece of dirt and have a fixed value again. Currently a house is a "home" that continues to increase in value despite the fact that it's actually depreciating every year. A home sitting on a piece of land is a fixed asset that once built and left alone depreciates over time just like an automobile does. Yes, you can argue that the land increases in value, but the home does not. Somewhere, somehow someone convinced the middle class that "homes" are the cornerstone of "making it". Some even argue that they are the best investment most people will make in their lifetime. In the past that may have been true - back when homes were equal to 2 years wages. Today, it's all total bullshit - and if you feel the hairs on the back of your neck starting to stand up with that statement - just shows you how deeply ingrained in our own belief systems that meme has become.
When a government already in debt bails out a company to the tune of 85 BILLION dollars, the value of the dollar (the one that you get paid in) goes down. Just call your dollar an IOU from the government - and your IOUs are no longer tied to anything tangible - in fact they're tied to the increased value of everyone's houses - which is made up entirely of more borrowed money...

Some day someone will notice that wages are losing ground with expenses at a rate of over 9% per year since 2001. Not kidding. If it hadn't been for the housing bubble, the war(s) and other great reasons for the US to print huge amounts of money and artificially inflate GDP, we'd get a nice clear picture of the problem. Unfortunately, you have to look at things like the price of gold and other mediums of exchange that have common value around the globe. If the price per ounce of gold is a good indicator of what your dollar is really worth. In 2001 $1.00 worth of gold is now worth $3.25 (not including the record setting pace that gold has jumped in the past 24 hours - that is world wide BTW, not just US - hang on to your hats...). That means that your $1.00 in 2001 is now worth about $0.31 on the world market compared to just 7 years ago. Many more banks, savings and loans and related financial insurance companies are going to go down or will be bailed out in the near future - both of those options mean that our dollars are going to be worth a lot less, so be prepared to work a lot harder for less... It's about time... Someone has to get stuck with the check - I just wish it was the ones who ate all the food and not those of us that did the cooking for them.