{"id":618,"date":"2008-10-31T13:01:01","date_gmt":"2008-10-31T20:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/?p=618"},"modified":"2008-11-15T19:50:33","modified_gmt":"2008-11-16T02:50:33","slug":"this-is-not-looking-any-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/2008\/10\/this-is-not-looking-any-better\/","title":{"rendered":"This is not looking any better"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"snap_shots\" href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/doc\/20081110\/greider2\">The Nation is tracking how the bailout is proceeding<\/a>.\u00a0 It continues to ring so wrong.<\/p>\n<p>This bit<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>But, if you look more closely at Paulson\u2019s transaction, the<br \/>\ntaxpayers were taken for a ride\u2013a very expensive ride. They paid $125<br \/>\nbillion for bank stock that a private investor could purchase for $62.5<br \/>\nbillion. That means half of the public\u2019s money was a straight-out gift<br \/>\nto Wall Street, for which taxpayers got nothing in return.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>is very irksome, but the private investor they are invoking is Warren Buffett, who was only putting up a few billion into Goldman-Sachs. And then they extend the analogy of the deal Buffett made with GS to cover all nine institutions, something I don\u2019t think is quite fair.<\/p>\n<p>But the upshot is that we appear to have the wolves in charge of the foxes in charge of the chicken coop. And the wolves are preparing for one last plunder before they retire. I don\u2019t trust the administration to monitor and manage the bailout, I don\u2019t trust the Congress to provide oversight on the wolves. I don\u2019t expect the Justice Department to initiate criminal prosecutions in a timely fashion. I don\u2019t trust the Republicans to do anything other than plunder the US treasury as best they can. And I don\u2019t trust the Democrats to provide any \u2018check and balance\u2019 to stop the Republicans. (Hell, they may even join the bandwagon.) It would be nice to be pleasantly surprised.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Nation is tracking how the bailout is proceeding.\u00a0 It continues to ring so wrong. This bit But, if you look more closely at Paulson\u2019s transaction, the taxpayers were taken for a ride\u2013a very expensive ride. They paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could purchase for $62.5 billion. That means half &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/2008\/10\/this-is-not-looking-any-better\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">This is not looking any better<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,12],"tags":[48,52],"class_list":["post-618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-politics","tag-economics","tag-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4NpF-9Y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":619,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions\/619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}