The NYT’s came out with an article Sunday that posed the question: Should the government nationalize the banks? Natually, our fearful leaders danced around the question of nationalization, fearing right wing backlash. The Dems still fear being called socialists and commies doncha know?
“This Week” on ABC, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, alluded to internal debate when she was asked whether nationalization, or partial nationalization, of the largest banks was a good idea.
“Well, whatever you want to call it,” said Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California. “If we are strengthening them, then the American people should get some of the upside of that strengthening. Some people call that nationalization.
“I’m not talking about total ownership,” she quickly cautioned — stopping herself by posing a question: “Would we have ever thought we would see the day when we’d be using that terminology? `Nationalization of the banks?’ “
How about we call it what it is then? Repossession.
Afterall, that’s what the banks would do to us isn’t it? We don’t call THEM commies or socialists when they repossess someone’s car who can’t pay their debts. I think the Dems should rightly point out that when We The People repossess their banks, it’s the same damned thing.
When you fail to pay your mortgage, don’t the banks repossess your home? They call it foreclosure, but it’s repossession. Because you can’t pay your debts.
Miss a few car payments and is it the car lot that sends the repo man? No, it’s the financial department. The ones who gave you the loan.
In fact, pretty much anything in life that you have to finance a loan to pay for, if you don’t come up with the money, they will repossess it. And it won’t stop there. Need a way to guarantee that loan? How about you put your house up? Oh dear! You can’t pay us back? We repossess the house too!
So what’s going on in the banking industry today?
They have debt obligations far in excess of their market value. In other words, they can’t pay back their loans. Well who do banks borrow from anyways? US. We The People. That’s who. So the banks OWE US THE MONEY and they can’t repay it. Which means we have every right on earth to repossess said banks.
They went out and lost all their money, then they kept losing money. A lot of it went into their fat little pockets. So let’s be honest here, they didn’t REALLY lose the money, they STOLE it. So not only do we have the right to repossess the banks, but we have the right to demand that those who ran this little Ponzie Scheme be sent to prison for a good long time.
That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”
Theivery, plain and simple.
So imagine if YOU had not only defaulted on your loans, but you’d committed fraud and theft and possibly even bankrupted the greatest nation on earth?
You think they’d let you keep your home? Your car? You think they’d march YOU off to jail? Or do you think they’d lavish YOU with with millions of dollars?
Nah, me neither.
So why is it so hard for the Dems to do the right thing?
The problem here is semantics. The Dems don’t want to be called socialists or commies, so they aren’t ready to “nationalize” the banks. Nationalization is what they do to banks in Venezuela, doncha know?
“I’m not talking about total ownership,” she (Pelosi) quickly cautioned — stopping herself by posing a question: “Would we have ever thought we would see the day when we’d be using that terminology? `Nationalization of the banks?’ “
So far, President Obama’s top aides have steered clear of the word entirely, and they are still actively discussing other alternatives, including creating a “bad bank” that would nationalize the worst nonperforming loans by taking them off the hands of financial institutions without actually taking ownership of the banks.
So instead, they’re doing it half-assed. We OWN the banks, we just don’t have any say in how they are run.
Others talk of de facto nationalization, in which the government owns a sizeable chunk of the banks but not a majority, with all that connotes.
That has already happened; taxpayers are now the biggest shareholders in Bank of America, with about 6 percent of the stock, and in Citigroup, with 7.8 percent. But the government’s influence is far larger than those numbers suggest, because it has guaranteed to absorb the losses of some of the two banks’ most toxic assets, a figure that could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Many believe this form of hybrid ownership — part government, part private, with the responsibilities of ownership unclear — will not prove workable.
“The case for full nationalization is far stronger now than it was a few months ago,” said Adam S. Posen, the deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “If you don’t own the majority, you don’t get to fire the management, to wipe out the shareholders, to declare that you are just going to take the losses and start over. It’s the mistake the Japanese made in the ’90s.“
How fucked up is that? We PAY for it and THEY get to keep running it?
The banks going to let you keep driving your car after they repossess it? They going to let you keep living in your home after they repossess it?
Why is it then, that THEY get to keep running their banks after WE repossess THEM?
Because, once again, the Dems are cowards. They don’t know how to tell the public the honest truth. That we have a RIGHT to own those banks. We PAID for them. They are ours. WE, the people, have the right to repossess what’s always been ours.