The stock market was hoping for good news today regarding the bailout bill. When the House of Representatives voted down the proposal which had support from only 60% of Democrats and 30% of Republicans, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 Index, and the price of oil dropped sharply.
With pressure from the Executive branch, I figured the Legislative branch would fold as quickly as they did with the PATRIOT Act when the immediate threat was terrorism rather than economic crisis. It should be interesting to see how this plays out, but I’ll try not to look at my investments until then. Perhaps I’ll use sharp downturns like today as buying opportunities.
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4:30 pm (reply)
Don’t buy, this is just the beginning, the market is going a lot lower.
I’m glad the bailout didn’t pass. I would rather have a 30% market from now so that we can start rebuilding the economy, rather than a slow drop of 30% over the several years with a devalued dollar. The most important think we have is not our houses, jobs or financial firms – they can all be replaced – but the value of our dollar cannot. We must protect the dollar, which we are doing by rejecting the bailout and printing money to pay for it.
5:04 pm (reply)
This is so unrelated to the Patriot Act. How this is going to play out is that if nothing is passed by Congress soon, you will begin to see more business failures and layoffs for Christmas, followed by an extended recession or worse. The car companies will be among the first to shut down and perhaps fail. The folks that are now calling their Congress people demanding “no” votes will be among those without jobs or ways to pay off their credit cards. Then who will they call?
8:25 pm (reply)
I’m also thrilled that this bill did not pass. With the timing of it being so close to the election, I think for a rare change our “representatives” are actually mindful (fearful) of the popular opinion around this issue. From what I hear, the calls, emails, and letters pouring into the officials’ offices are overwhelmingly against this bailout.
I can’t stomach the idea of bailing out corporations who waltzed off with untold millions while playing dice with our economy and raving about how their industry didn’t need regulation because unregulated markets would correct themselves. Now they don’t want to take the medicine of their correction, and the taxpayers are being asked to foot the bill, with no oversight, and for not even a potential return for our money. And the bottom line is that even if this bailout had passed, it can’t fix the underlying and pervasive problems of this economy: that we’re deeply in debt, we’re out of cheap fuel, and we have basically no ability to defer gratification. We want what we want when we want it; because we “deserve” it, as the advertisers have taught us.
So while we (and our progeny ad infinitum) have momentarily dodged being stuck with the bill for this gross fiscal malfeasance, we’re going to end up paying the bill one way or the other. Either in endless taxes, or in a vastly reduced economy. Probably both, actually.
10:55 am (reply)
No bill is a good bill!
11:33 am (reply)
The market was down 250 points before the vote yesterday. It is back up 250 points from it’s drop of 520 points after the vote. The net drop from the failure to bail out wall street 270 points. That is hardly the end of the world scenerio the administration is painting.
11:37 pm (reply)
In retrospect after the governemt bailed out wall street and the mortage companies I think it is only fare that some of this money goes to those of us who are middle class workers struggling to make ends meet. Why cant the government force the credit card companies to make some accomodations like waving late fees and lowereing the finance charges so those of us with debt can pay it back rather then be forced to go to debt consolidation or file bankruptcy. This way they are assured to get most of their money back rather than none at all.
STRUGGLING MIDDLE CLASS WORKER WHO IS TIRED OF IT ALL!