Quote:
Originally Posted by Dean
If your company doesn't borrow money on a regular basis, you are better than most, but be aware that your customers won't be able to borrow any...
We are not talking about the situation a week ago, we are talking about a whole new near zero lending environment as a possibility...
Old people can get old, but unless the health care companies have cash on the balance sheet to fund their projects, nobody is going to loan even them any and your project list will quickly drop to zero except possibly federal government funded ones. How many of those do you have and can tehy support your whole company?
The reason congress is getting 20:1 against the rescue plan calls from constituents is because the masses do not understand how dependent our entire economy is dependent on the credit markets.
Do you think Toys-R-Us pays cash up front for the toys they bring in for the holiday season?....
Do you think your mechanic pays cash for the parts he puts into your car when he gets them from the local parts store and they pay cash up front when they get them from the distributor and the distributor pays up front from the manufacturer and they from the raw materials provider and subcontractors?
Every one of those happens on CREDIT!!!
These and countless other day to day business to business, consumer to business and even business to employee monetary transactions could be blown out of the water.
Our economy lives on short term credit and many of those markets are either broken, or on the verge.
If we get to the point where the U.S. has to run on a cash up front basis, no job will be safe except maybe the farmers.
We are no longer just talking about recession, but the real possibility of a depression. "Grapes of Wrath" kind of stuff... That is some scary $4!+ and may be the price of inaction...
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I can't disagree with any of this.
However, the "fix" is not stealing billions of dollars from the taxpayers to prolong the situation. Plain and simple: our economy is broken. The actual fix is to let it fail and build a new one either with proper regulation, or with zero regulation and the understanding that when shit hits the fan there is no bailout.
This bullshit of "they're too big to fail" is just that: bullshit. I fully understand that we're looking at a possible depression. What I don't understand is how $700B from the taypayers does anything but prolong the inevitable. I'd much rather get this crash over with sooner rather than later. The fundamentals of our economy are anything but sound. Pumping more money into it doesn't uncorrupt the fundamental greed that got us into this situation. Only the failure of the institutions that got us here will, and the shitty part of that is that a lot more than just the financial market are going to go down the tubes with it unfortunately.
Now perhaps there's a smarter bailout plan that could work. But having the taypayers buy out bad debt from companies that deserve to be out of business to take it off their books so they can continue with their poor practices is not it. The bailout plan was way too short sighted, and gave way too much power to the gov't folks making the decisions. Congress made the right call on this one IMO.