September 29, 2008
This is the question on everyone’s mind as they ponder the new “bailout bill”, officially known as the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It is available for everyone to read on the Internet (all 110 pages of it), but most people are looking for answers to the most important questions: Will it pass and will it work?
Just after midnight on Monday morning, David Rogers, of Politico.com, reported that the bill (which goes to the House floor on Monday and the Senate floor on Wednesday) was still facing resistance from both the right and the left, despite the support voiced by both Presidential candidates. Republican Congressman Chris Shays of Connecticut was quoted in the article as saying that: “For this to pass, a lot of people are going to have to change their minds”. The following passage provided more light on the view of this bill from those House Republicans providing resistance to the measure:
Yet a closed-door party meeting Sunday night illustrated all the problems anew. The session ran for hours, and while Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said he would vote for the bill, he could not predict the number of votes he would have for it, and he famously referred to the measure as a “crap sandwich” before his rank and file.
Jackie Kucinich reported for TheHill.com that earlier in the day, Congressman Mike Pence of Indiana had sent out a letter to his fellow Republicans in opposition to this bill:
The decision to give the federal government the ability to nationalize almost every bad mortgage in America interrupts this basic truth of our free market economy … Republicans improved this bill but it remains the largest corporate bailout in American history, forever changes the relationship between government and the financial sector, and passes the cost along to the American people. I cannot support it.
The opposition to the bill from the Democratic side was discussed in another Politico.com article: this one by Ryan Grimm. Grimm’s article discussed an “intense” Democratic Caucus meeting. He quoted Minnesota Congressman James Oberstar as describing resistance to the bill coming from across the complete spectrum of Democratic opinion, from liberal to conservative. California Congressman Brad Sherman had met with Republican Darrell Issa before the meeting. Sherman’s contribution to the Caucus discussion was described this way by Ryan Grimm:
Sherman spoke out against the bill during the caucus meeting, arguing that billions of dollars would flow to foreign investors, that oversight was lax and that limits on executive compensation were too weak. Rep. Joe Baca (D-Calif.) said he was leaning toward a no vote, too.
The House vote on the bill is scheduled to take place after a four-hour debate, beginning at 8 a.m. on Monday.
Whether or not this bill will ultimately “work” is another question. Paul Krugman, Economics Professor at Princeton University, wrote in the Sunday New York Times:
The bailout plan released yesterday is a lot better than the proposal Henry Paulson first put out — sufficiently so to be worth passing. But it’s not what you’d actually call a good plan, and it won’t end the crisis. The odds are that the next president will have to deal with some major financial emergencies.
Steve Lohr’s report from the Sunday New York Times, discussed the outlook for this plan, as voiced by Robert E. Hall, an economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative research group at Stanford. Lohr observed:
There was no assurance that the bailout plan would work as intended to ease financial turmoil and economic uncertainty.
Lohr’s article then focused on the opinion of Nouriel Roubini, an economist at the Stern School of Business at New York University:
The $350 billion to $400 billion in bad credit reported by the banks so far could eventually exceed $1.5 trillion, he estimated, as banks are forced to write off more bad loans, not only on more housing-related debt, but also for corporate lending, consumer loans, credit cards and student loans.
The rescue package, if successful, would make the recognition of losses and the inevitable winnowing of the banking system more an orderly retreat than a collapse. Yet that pruning of the banking industry must take place, economists say, and it is the government’s role to move it along instead of coddling the banks if the financial system is going to return to health.
A more unpleasant perspective appeared in an editorial published in the September 25 edition of The Economist:
If the economics of Mr Paulson’s plan are broadly correct, the politics are fiendish. You are lavishing money on the people who got you into this mess. Sensible intervention cannot even buy long-term relief: the plan cannot stop house prices falling and the bloated financial sector shrinking. Although the economic risk is that the plan fails, the political risk is that the plan succeeds. Voters will scarcely notice a depression that never happened. But even as they lose their houses and their jobs, they will see Wall Street once again making millions.
Whatever your definition of “success” might be for this plan, the experts agree that things aren’t going to return to “normal” for a long time, if ever.
McCain Loses His Chance
October 2, 2008
It was the opportunity for a “game-changing move” in the 2008 Presidential campaign. Just as John McCain was dropping back in the polls, providing Barack Obama the chance to “close the deal” even more decisively than he did with Hillary Clinton, McCain missed the opportunity to turn the game around. Last week, he arrived in Washington (after the pseudo-suspension of his campaign) on a mission to save us all from the crisis declared by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. After McCain arrived, he found a number of both Republican and Democratic members of the House of Representatives opposed to the revised, 110-page, economic “bailout bill” (the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008). At that point in time, McCain had the opportunity to break with the unpopular Bush Administration and band together with the 133 Republican and 95 Democratic House members (who eventually voted against the bill) to form a “coalition of mavericks” (oxymoron, non-sequitur or both?) resisting this bailout of the big banks and other “fat cats” on Wall Street. He didn’t. He chose instead, to copy whatever Barack Obama was doing. Besides, his move dovetailed well with the pseudo-“bipartisan” duet he had been playing, throughout the entire campaign, with Joe “The Tool” Lieberman. Had McCain stood with those 133 young Republican members of the House and the 95 Democrats (many of whom consider themselves conservative, “Blue Dog” Democrats) he could have re-ignited his flatulent campaign. (Is it really safe to do that? — Let’s ask Johnny Knoxville.)
Howard Fineman provided an interesting retrospective of this phase in the evolution the economic “bailout bill” at the Newsweek website on September 30:
When the second revision of this bill (at over 400 pages) finally made it to the Senate floor for the vote on Wednesday, October 1, there were 9 Democrats, 15 Republicans and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, voting against it. McCain again missed the opportunity for a truly bipartisan resistance to this measure. Such an act would have demonstrated genuine leadership. He could have rejoined his old buddy, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, as well as Florida Democrat Bill Nelson and rising Democratic star, Maria Cantwell from the State of Washington, all of whom voted against this measure. Such a move would have emboldened resistance to the “bailout bill” in the House of Representatives, where the term of office lasts only two years. (The short term results in greater accountability to American voters, who are believed to have notoriously short memory spans.)
Is this bill really necessary? On the October 1 edition of MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Paul Krugman, Economics Professor at Princeton University, admitted that:
When Keith Olbermann asked Krugman about the likelihood that nothing consequential would happen if this bill did not pass, Krugman responded by saying that such possibilities have “shrunk in the past week”. Krugman went on to claim that “the credit crunch has started to hit Main Street”, using, as an example, the rumor that: “McDonald’s has started to cut credit to its franchisees.” McDonald’s has issued a press release stating that this was not the case. What is really happening is that the banks are acting like spoiled children, holding their breath until the government gives them what they want, using the threat of unavailable credit as a gun to the head of Congress.
Public opposition to this bailout was best summed up by Peggy Noonan, when she appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on October 1:
John McCain had the opportunity to stand with those people, as well as the 133 House Republicans and 15 Senate Republicans, to do “the right thing”. He decided to forego that opportunity. Barack Obama said, on the Senate floor Wednesday, that it was not worth risking the American economy and the world economy by challenging this bill. John McCain decided that it was not worth risking his Presidential campaign on such a challenge. That’s too bad for him. The gamble probably would have paid off.