Leave the moose alone. And don’t shoot anybody in the face.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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This has parody-song opportunities written all over it. With apologies to Pink Floyd: “Hey, Palin! Leave those moose alone!” 🙂
Come join in with the rest of the lyrics: “We don’t need no Sarah Palin…we don’t need no John McCain…no right-wing nutjobs in the White House…”
Okay, maybe I need a vacation!
Moose, loose.
“Screw Colorado”?
While I was driving home last night I saw this bumper sticker on the back window of an SUV:
Part of me wanted to run up to the window, drag the woman driving the SUV out of the car, shake her and say “WHAT are you thinking?” It was a tough call.
I would have paid good money for front row seats to that
l’d of paid her bail.
I knew I could count on you if the chips were down 🙂
Next time I’ll e-mail you and get a bid – if it’s enough I might do it. 🙂
All donated to Obama of course.
I want to make sticky post-it notes that people can use – no harm done – for exactly these situations. They’d say things like, “You couldn’t be more wrong” or, if it’s an Obama sign, “Thank you for doing the right thing!”
If her window was down I could have stuck the sticky thing on her forehead. Now there’s a thought …
probably no jail time for that – not worth the police effort. It would have saved dada my bail.
I’ve often thought about installing one of these in my back window so I could pass people then let them know exactly what I think.
There’s a summary of the DeFazio et al bailout plan up at The Nation’s website. Based on this Op-Ed from William Isaac, former FDIC chair under Reagan. (Seems like an odd place to go for a “more progressive rescue plan”, but then who knows?)
Anyone have any thoughts? My initial reaction is that putting it under the FDIC and using the established FDIC procedures for oversight is already an improvement over having it administered by the Secretary of the Treasury. And since this is based on a program that worked for us in the past, I have more faith that it will work in the future.
I don’t know about the proposed “mark-to-market” accounting rule changes. My google-fu tells me that “mark-to-market” accounting practices seem to have some shady history around them and didn’t come into use in financial institutions until the 80s despite having been around since the 19th century. I have a gut-level distrust of any regulatory changes that occurred in the Reagan era or after, so I’m predisposed to think that this might be a good idea, but I’ve seen other folks critical of it.
Well, it’s nice to see (progressive) Democrats finally introduce their own plan. Will the Dem leadership pay any attention to this at all? That lefty site dKos has a front page diary about this.
My initial reaction is that putting it under the FDIC and using the established FDIC procedures for oversight is already an improvement over having it administered by the Secretary of the Treasury. And since this is based on a program that worked for us in the past, I have more faith that it will work in the future.
I agree with both those reactions. There is no question that this is a better plan.
I don’t know about the proposed “mark-to-market” accounting rule changes.
I don’t know about that, either. The proposal notes that “no meaningful market exists [in] the current market for mortgage backed securities”, so that it is not possible to come up with a market price. This came up at the hearings, with the talk of reverse auctions. Doing what the plan proposes, “requir[ing] an economic value standard to measure the capital of financial institutions” sounds like a more reasonable idea to me. It would be interesting to see how easy it will be for accountants to come up with an “intrinsic” as opposed to market value for these assets. The writers of the Paulson plan seem to assume it can’t be done. But if it can’t be done, why not treat such assets as worthless junk?
I also don’t know why the plan calls for the FDIC buying “net worth certificates” (which I had never heard of) instead of preferred shares, which what’s done in the other proposals I’ve seen which I discussed here.
I hate to be a Negative Nelly but that “Progressive” plan is just awful. Has the whole World gone mad?
I changed my mind about this: I agree with you now.
Understanding the Significance of Mark-to-Market Accounting
And here’s a good post tallying up what we know so far to be the impact to the federal balance sheet (it’s already most likely in the trillions):
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2008/09/detroit_gets_in.html
These snake oil salesmen from both parties are lying when they tell us less than $600 Billion is at stake (hell, some are telling us we could make a profit!). The politicians aren’t talking about the real numbers which will be quite scary–members of both parties are guilty in creating this mess and want to hide it. Bush will leave office with a public debt of over $10 Trillion and a couple more trillion in hidden obligations (plus there are the hidden costs from the Iraq war). We are closing in on a public debt of 100% of our GDP and it’s increasing like crazy this year alone (see the post above).
And now they are changing the accounting rules to obfuscate even more.
They are wrapping baling twine around this sucker and getting out of town with all the loot before she blows.
Like I said, I haven’t read or thought much about this, and I know that their changing the accounting rules sounds fishy. But it might be a step in the right direction. In this financial madness that had taken over the American economy, the market was king. Well, now the market for these toxic assets has disappeared, so there is no way to place a value on them. So Paulson just wants the Treasury to pay as much for them as he can get away with to help his buddies. This alternative progressive plan is saying, let’s see how much they’re really worth, and let the banks that own them keep them. If we can’t figure out what they’re worth, then they’re worth nothing.
My sense is that this could be a challenge to the financial, market-idolizing craziness that got us here. I could be wrong of course. But I think we should be charitable with progressive Congresspeople and give them the benefit of the doubt, something Reid and Pelosi most certainly do not deserve.
I was just taken aback by points 1 through 3 which strike me as flailing about and terrible policy. I don’t support bans on short selling and the mark to fantasy accounting rules. And I don’t know why we are changing the accounting rules in a supposed liquidity crisis to make the true value of toxic assets even more opaque. Less transparency only hides the problem for later–and probably makes it worse. If you were a bank would you want to lend to another bank that was able to obscure it’s toxic crap? And the short selling stuff is just silly scapegoating (on par with these fear mongers who are telling us we better do something, anything, to make the markets go UP, UP ). The short sellers have done the market a favor–they were the ones that were trying to warn us of the dangers. Putting our head in the sand, whether it be accounting gimmicks, or trying to artificially prop up markets via bans on short selling, are only going to hide the problems for a little bit or actually make things worse.
It’s just baling wire and a prayer my friend.
So I don’t know why the first 3 points were included in this proposal.
And point 5 I can get on board with (the raising of the FDIC limit), I guess, but I would like to know the estimated financial impact of that. I don’t know why we are changing all the rules of American capitalism in such short order. People knew the risks when they invested over 100K in banks–if this costs billions more next year and we don’t have the money maybe it’s not wise. I would much rather beef up the FDIC and recapitalize it first.
I guess point 4 is the “progressive” effort to deal with recapitalizing banks and financial institutions, which is the real meat of the proposal. I guess that’s the progressive response to Paulson’s plan (the other 4 points aren’t necessarily progressive). On that I don’t know. Seems like this is a complicated way of recapitalizing banks and financial firms. I’ll have to look into it. So far the FDIC has been able to deal with insolvent banks. I don’t know what the best solution is–but we need independent economists, regulators, and other professsionals to lead that effort. We don’t need a gun pointed to our heads and political bombs going off. We should save the banks hat can and should be saved. But I don’t understand why we need to rush into buying toxic assets like a Paulson plan would have us do.
As far as this proposal as a whole . . . I ‘m disappointed this is what they came up with. I guess I should be more supportive, like you suggest, and the progressives really are the most grown up legislators we have. But they really whiffed on this one. They blew their chance to get back to basic liberal economic principles.
A way of looking at the Paulson plan is that it is an attempt to preserve mark-to-market when that practice has clearly become inoperative. The market is gone, so let’s let the government set an arbitrary value for these assets, the way it set a figure for the bailout plan itself.
This suggests that that this alternative plan is in fact a direct assault upon the thinking underlying the Paulson plan.