Like that idiot from the bigpicture blog? We had calls for 10% dividends on tarp and wiping out shareholders as if that was going to work. John Paulson(the HF manager) sat in front of congress and say the dividend was supposed to be higher, some said the tax payers 'needed to be protected' by sitting higher than stockholders, 'god forbid the government prevents a depression without giving the taxpayer the best risk adjusted rate of return' was their mindset. Its now pretty clear common equity is needed and they were all wrong The perma paulson critics are quick to demand accountability for the TARP yet they gave bad advice and recommended the MISUSE of taxpayer money, how come we are not hearing their apologies? How many of them will send their salaries to the treasury, after all how come they want to be rewarded for mistakes? Why they hold the government and ceos at a standard they themselves are not willing to live up to? Soros is saying the FT.com that equity capital(as opposed to preferred) and a bigger tarp is needed, yes the same guy who say $700b in preferred was 'more than sufficient' Interesting how anyone who disagrees with him is a biased market fundamentalist guided by a 'dangerous ideology' and when he messes up its just an honest miscalculation
Last I checked, most simply oppose TARP or any type of bailout. The rest bicker about bullsh*t and are either lying or total idiots.
This bailout has a really bad smell to it. There is only one way the economy is going to turn around and that's by getting the consumer spending again but consumers will not spend because they can't take on any more debt than they currently have. Consumers are as highly leveraged as the banks so they have to pay down their debt before they reach for their wallets. The raging bull market of the late-90's was driven by debt, pure and simple. That kind of economic advance probably won't happen for another 80 years because the effects of that debt bubble will take a long time to wear off. Enough rant for today....
http://www.financialsense.com/transcriptions/2002/Gordon.html The K winter should have started in 2002, but Greenspan / Bernanke managed to postpone it until 2007.
I used to read Richard Russell a number of years ago and all he talked about was the advance from 2002 to 2007 being manufactured and how the Fiat currency would eventually collapse. At the time I had a very naive view of monetary policy and I thought Russell was another one of those perma bears. Russell did miss a lot of that massive bull run but boy was he right. I learned a lot from reading that guy.