On Wall Street:
The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost “confidence” in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another’s portfolios.
So they have stopped investing. The biggest, most respected investment firms threaten to come crashing down. You can’t have that. It’s just fine to make it harder for the average Joe to file for bankruptcy, as did that wretched bankruptcy bill passed by Congress in 2005 at the request of the credit card industry. But the big guys are “too big to fail,” because they could bring us all down with them.
Enter the federal government, the institution to which the wealthy are not supposed to pay capital gains or inheritance taxes. Good God, you don’t expect these people to trade in their BMWs for Saturns, do you?
In a deal that the New York Times described as “shocking,” J.P. Morgan Chase agreed over the weekend to pay $2 a share to buy all of Bear Stearns, one of the brand names of finance capitalism. The Federal Reserve approved a $30 billion — that’s with a “b” — line of credit to make the deal work.
Thirty billion. You have to wonder why there have been no counter-top investigations. When Graeme Frost made the profound mistake of telling America that he had benefitted from a government program in the debate over the SCHIP expansion which would cost the taxpayers a similar amount, he got the full-on Beauchamp. Personally, I need to know what the countertops look like at some Bear Stearns households.
Zifnab
So Another One Bites the Dust? I just wish if I went under like this, the government would step in to Save Me. But, you know, this is just how those Wall Street types Play the Game.
Wait, maybe I’m thinking of a different kind of Queen.
Jake
Capitalist Pig Jim Rogers:
Zifnab
Fixed.
blackfrancis
the only way you’ll get to see those counter tops would be at the foreclosure sales.
oh, wait there won’t be any due to government bailout.
is this the equivalent of me not paying for my columbia house membership?
blackfrancis
Nice
4tehlulz
Jim Rogers:
Lol. Paultard detected. I guess having massive bank runs every twenty or thirty years would be better, amirite?
Alan
When Jimmy Rogers talks people should listen. He was the fundamentals expert behind George Soros’s trading in their Quantum Fund.
Jake
Nope. His point is if businesses know the government and the reserve won’t throw them a ton of cash everytime they get greedy and fuck up, they won’t make the same mistakes over and over again. If a business fucks up and fails another (presuambly better) business will step in and fill the gap. You know, the free market and all that.
JGabriel
These are the same guys whose tax cuts Bush wants us to extend, right?
Well, fine, we’ll bail them out – but only if we raise their taxes AND they promise not to bitch about it for next 50 years.
.
DBrown
Hey, its about time the Fed became a bank for large investment houses to tap – that way, ‘they play we pay’ can replace ‘In God we Trust’
slippy hussein toad
I hate corporations. I hate Republicans. I hate rich people.
I hate them because they’re fucking lazy and useless.
rawshark
They don’t call those ‘mistakes’, they call them ‘risks’ and they won’t take them without a safety net. These beautiful people are why our country is so great. If we don’t help them when a ‘risk’ bites them they’ll stop trying to blaze new beautiful trails and we will be left wanting. So you see its a good thing to bail them out. We’re really bailing out the whole country.
Conservatives have always supported the nobles, always. We need to get people who work at WalMart but think they’re conservative because they go to church to realize this.
bago
You can’t see their counter-tops. They are covered by this golden parachute you see…
LiberalTarian
You know, Real Housewives of the OC and Real Housewives of NYC tend to reinforce your point.
Punchy
And here’s what I CANNOT figure out: why the fuck is it currently selling for $8+/share, ATM?
Can someone please explain how JPM prices it at $2 and the market turns right around and says, “Nope, $8, bitches”? WTF?
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
When is John Cole going to reject, denounce and distance himself from slippy HUSSEIN toad? John Cole cannot claim he wasn’t in attendence when slippy HUSSEIN toad made his divisive and hateful comments. If John Cole doesn’t immediately and categorically reject, denounce and distance himself from slippy HUSSEIN toad then it would be safe to assume that John Cole not only endorses slippy HUSSEIN toad’s comments, but that John Cole himself hates Amurica.
JWeidner
Can I just say, as an OC resident, and not all that far from Coto de Caza where that pus-filled boil of a show is filmed…that is SO not representative of a huge portion of Orange County.
Admittedly, there are large enclaves of the rich and even super-rich in Orange County, but the vast majority of us are hard-working, normal people.
Zifnab
I was listening to this on NPR. Back in 1930, the federal government choose not to bail anybody out and let the big banks simply fail. It was the Coolidge / Hoover policy of laisse-faire economics – no regulation and no oversight, but no bail outs either.
Bear Sterns did something foolish and stupid. They are still a pillar of the financial community. If they go under, they drag a bunch of other people with them. One bank run becomes dozens of bank runs. And the resulting fall-out is much, much worse than the damage done by inflation caused by a bail out.
Now, the question still stands – where does the government get the bail out money from? If we lived in a truly socialized society, these guys would be paying 50%+ tax rates and our Congress would be sweeping in to regulate the unregulated market that caused this clusterfuck. But we don’t.
The problem isn’t the bail out. Bad market events like this are – to some degree – inevitable. The problem is that the banks refuse to pick up the tab during the good years for the damage they do in the bad years. Ten years down the road I suspect people will be more receptive to big taxes on the rich. When a JP Morgan exec bemoans the death of capitalism, fewer people will take him seriously. I hope.
Zifnab
Bulk discount?
Jorge
Zifnab – exactly. Brilliant. Bring back the 70% rate for people making over 10 million a year. Seriously.
Edmund Dantes
All I can say is I would have bought Bear Stearns for 3 dollars a share and I only would have needed 10 billion dollars in guarantees to do it.
Next time shop around Fed.
El Cid
Maybe their counter-tops would be lined with all those golden eggs I hear the rich are laying that maybe somehow or someday would get out to the rest of society.
rawshark
But if we tax the beautiful job creators they will work less hard. Same situation as when we don’t bail them out. Either way they take their ball and go home.
matt
This quote from RedState in reference to the Obama/Wright story deserves some kind of award.
Really? Really?
Paul L.
Interesting comparison Bear Stearns vs. SCHIP
Apples and Oranges
More on Bear Stearns
Of course the blame for this misunderstanding should go to the article writer E. J. Dionne Jr. who represented this as a Federal ballout.
Zifnab
/Pulls out conservative patriotic field manual.
/monotone
“America is the greatest country in the world.”
“Businesses flock to our shores because we are such a strong force in the global economy.”
“If an entrepreneur can not handle the rigors of the market place, he will be replaced by a better competitor who can.”
Did I miss anything?
LiberalTarian
Yeah, the women and their husbands on those two Bravo shows are about as “real” as chicklet teeth. I try to just blow by the super rich as “well, some have, some don’t, everyone has problems.” But, my prude side kicks up when I actually listen to what they have to say–so incredibly shallow and dumb.
And Wallstreet welfare? It’s having to bail out the Paris Hilton crowd on the public dime, when vast public resources have already been poured into their pockets.
Meanwhile, I know sane, intelligent middle class people who are freaking out about what is going to mean to us down here when:
the energy crisis
meets global warming
meets economic disaster
meets lack of public preparedness caused by the government becoming the handmaiden of the wealthy.
I’m telling ya, it is enough to keep you awake at night. A friend of mine told me he was raised to always save a little for a rainy day, but what good is scrimping now when a deluge is on the way??
Tsulagi
Typical lefty with no business sense. It would be 2 1/2 months. Freedom isn’t cheap.
Main reason, the deal is still subject to shareholder approval. Some are betting the final price will be higher.
jrg
How come the taxpayers of the Cayman islands never have to pay for multi-billion dollar corporate bail-outs and no-bid contracts?
It’s astounding the degree to which the American middle class is getting ripped off. We pay taxes to bail these fuckers out, and they still incorporate their subsidiaries and funds offshore.
If we’re going to give away our tax dollars to corporations, can we please give them away to corporations not involved with war profiteering and/or wrecking our economy?
Jason
I would like to make an announcement to any investment bank board of directors that may be reading this site.
If you have a recently departed CEO and are in need of a new one, I am very confident that I too can cause your company to lose billions of dollars and I will do it for only half the price of the last guy. Feel free to email me with the details of my inevitable severance package.
LiberalTarian
Amen!
LiberalTarian
Po widdo wich peepel:
via Atrios
Walker
That’s fine. But then they should not be compensated as if they were taking risks. The problem is that these “capitalists” want it both ways. They way the safety net, but then they want to be paid the large amounts that people pay them precisely because they are working without a net. Instead, they should be paid as much as a government employee is paid for the same job, because that is the amount of risk they are taking on.
rawshark
Yes. If you go into the barn you’ll see that most of the commandments have been changed.
‘“If an entrepreneur can not handle the rigors of the market place, he will be replaced by a better competitor who can, unless it’s decided that the economy can’t handle the shakeup in which case we will take steps.”
Jon H
” Personally, I need to know what the countertops look like at some Bear Stearns households.”
I believe they use prone, naked supermodels.
Jon H
“When Jimmy Rogers talks people should listen. He was the fundamentals expert behind George Soros’s trading in their Quantum Fund.”
Then one should not assume Rogers doesn’t have a profit-making angle in promoting his views.
rawshark
That’s all well and good but we can easily remove that uncomfortable thought from the minds of the voters with a snappy slogan or two. As Captain Beatty said if these corrupt things have to occur there’s no need for anyone worry about it.
Stoic
“You have to wonder why there have been no counter-top investigations….”
Hmmmm, the Governor of New York would be the logical initiator of investigations into financial corruption on Wall Street. Especially if he was a former prosecutor know for his relentless pursuit of the same. But, why lookie here, Martha, he got caught in a federal (read Republican sponsored) sting.
Who says our government doesn’t work?
Jon H
“But, why lookie here, Martha, he got caught in a federal (read Republican sponsored) sting.”
Eh. There might well be shenanigans, but Spitzer went above and beyond the call of duty to enable them. Nobody forced Spitzer to make those wire transfers.
I mean, hell, at least Clinton got his hummers in the office and without elaborate travel plans and money transfers.
JGabriel
Can you smell the irony?
New York Times:
.
DougJ
The Islamofascists behead you when you lose billions on subprime loans. Just remember that.
rawshark
Will the fed buy those too?
cbear
I don’t have a problem with the Wall Street bailout.
Unlike many of you, I’m smart enough to realize that penalizing the people at the top will adversely impact all the little people below them by restricting the
piss-downtrickle-down effect.Stupit libruls.
ACK
My guess is that any buying going on is more of a function of people/institutions covering their short positions rather than any new found love for BSC. But who knows.
JGabriel
Punchy:
I’ve seen two possible explanations for this, purely speculative and resting on the belief that the deal isn’t done until the shareholders vote on it, but here they are:
1) The markets expect the shareholders to vote against the deal. There’s more to this involving the motivations of stockholders and bondholders, but that’s the gist.)
2) The markets expect the shareholders to hold out for a higher valuation from JPMorgan. Perhaps not as unfounded as one might initially think: there’s a reasonable argument that given the assets involved – especially with the $30 billion in Fed guarantees – that if it’s BS is worth a dollar, then it’s at least worh a billion, which would be about 4 times the JPMorgan offer.
Hard to say which explanation is more likely, or if it’s something else altogether. Also, it might be the strength of both arguments – there’s nothing mutually contradictory in them.
.
Brachiator
But part of the problem here is that the Bush Administration has offered little regulation, less oversight but mucho bailout.
And following on your reference to history, there was a time in the 1920s when President Calvin Coolidge said that “the business of America is business.” I have recently heard some commentators equate the entire US economy with the financial markets in an attempt to rationalize the US government’s attempt to maintain an “orderly market” and insure “investor confidence.”
I don’t think that this conventional wisdoms holds, especially when what happens within the financial markets is so destructive to the national economy.
The irony is that Bear Stearns IS going under anyway. There is a further irony that they are being bought by JP Morgan Chase, which used to be two independent banks (JP Morgan and Chase Manhattan). So mergers or consolidations or buyouts of one bank by another apparently can be a bad or good thing, depending on the degree of moaning and crying by the financial institutions.
What also rankles me is the belief that financial institutions are more important to the economy than the economic life of real people, or that we can ignore stuff like the following:
Since the ascension of the Bush Administration, the bankruptcy laws have been “tightened” to force individuals to be “more responsible.”
If people lose their homes to a foreclosure, they may have to report as cancellation of debt income a part of the value of the mortgage they had even though they don’t have a dime in their pocket or the house that they used to live in.
If people do a short sell, selling their home for a loss, they cannot deduct the loss on their tax returns.
On the other side, financial institutions that pushed, packaged and resold risky loans can write the losses off their books, have recourse to more relaxed bankruptcy rules than govern individuals, and can get rescued by the federal government so that they can go out and defraud the public all over again.
And on top of it, they will whine that any attempt to regulate them will interfere with the efficient functioning of free markets.
What a racket.
Tsulagi
From Paul L and his QandO link…
Read most of his piece. Don’t know why I bothered. Obviously he is a little bit slow and tarded, but you would think he might be able to keep up somewhat. What he thinks he knows or was told he knows is somewhat based on so last week.
At $2 share, the Bear Stearns deal is valued at $236m. J.P. Morgan could put that on a credit card; they don’t need Fed guarantees for that. This would more accurately reflect the current deal…
Those “hard-to-value assets?” The sub-prime and other junk securities that got Stearns into its mess.
So let’s see, J.P. Morgan gets a company including its real estate holdings for pocket change, the Fed (taxpayers) gets to guarantee the deal is profitable for Morgan. Win/win type scenario in the Party of Bush.
But no worries, cue not-so-future Condi: “No one could ever have imagined those sub-prime securities held by Stearns would go down the shitter causing the Fed (taxpayers) to cover the losses.” They see the big picture.
PaminBB
Zifnab:
“Ten years down the road I suspect people will be more receptive to big taxes on the rich. ”
Why wait 10 years? The sooner the better.
JGabriel
Tsulagi:
Yep. And let’s not forget that at $30 billion in Fed guarantees vs. ~$260 million from JP Morgan, that’s a ration of more than 100 to 1 of Fed dollars risked versus JPM dollars.
.
The Other Steve
3/4 point cut!
What I find so fascinating about these cuts, is that my savings account immediately cuts their rate.
But I’m still waiting for my HELOC and credit card rates to drop.
:-)
The Grand Panjandrum
The Bear Stearns HQ in NYC is worth more than the 236 million offered by JPM. The stockholders will never agree to that share price.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
I think the article is obviously over-blown, but my bosses in the financial arena could certainly use a good beating or five. It is an interesting situation where the funds are sitting on their hands because they can’t be sure of what they’re investing in. Congress could fix that right now by forcing a mass disclosure of every piece of subprime instrument held by every company.
At least these jerk-offs are learning that regulation might limit their opportunities, but comes with the up-side of limiting their risk. Of course, a lot of those people are addicted to risk. Go figure.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
I wanna make sure something is known…
When the Bear Stearn debacle happened, it wasn’t just because they bought a bunch of subprime, la de da. It’s also because the subprime, on top of the other positions they took, we _by no means_ properly hedged against the market. If I remember correctly, they were hedged for about 1/10th the ratio they were supposed to be. That’s _very_ reckless. They got hit by this corrosive element (subprime) first, because the hedge fund manager exposed them all to the risk.
Bear Stearns is currently the benchmark for whether the government is “bailing out” anyone. Bear Stearns needs to be destroyed. Cause and effect. Saving their asses is certain “moral hazard”.
Now, should all the _other_ guys get hit because Bear Stearns left a fat vacuum? Maybe, maybe not. It’s up for debate. Maybe they should have acted as a community to stop BS. Then again, they’re supposed to be competing, and not colluding. This is where the moral dilemma is: in how the others get treated.
But Bear Stearns needs to eat it. They were reckless.
RSA
From a WSJ link at Yglesias:
Wall Street usually celebrates when the labor market loosens up, right? . . .Right?
Dennis - SGMM
It’s not like they’re machinists or textile workers or foundrymen.
4tehlulz
BAWWWWWWWWWWWW Now I’m on the ass end of creative destruction…BAWWWWWWWWWWW
JGabriel
Caidence:
Apparently they did. They stopped doing business with Bear Stearns, and called in their loans, which is why BS’s capital dried up and they became insolvent.
.
Martin
Jim Rogers:
Everyone at BS lands on their feet.
Chuck Butcher
I suppose it’s hard for everybody to figure out how a small time construction contractor feels about all this…
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
A good point. Maybe I’m thinking too much in strict terms of “community” over capitalism. I guess I’m just a damn pinko commie finance programmer.
d2 at 43rdstateblues
What the counters look like might just make you cry. New York’s famed Plaza Hotel, 2 units on the 14th floor, for which he paid $28 million.
For anyone keeping track, that’s 12% of what Bear Stearns sold for over the weekend.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/bears-chairman-buys-26-million-condo/
Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a new poster-child for outrageous executive pay, what with Ken Lay having the bad taste to die his way out of that position and all.
TenguPhule
TenguPhule
I guess failing economics was worth all that money, AMIRITE?
You don’t have bank runs when people are confident in the banks not being complete idiots.
And if wishes were fishes….
TenguPhule
I predict mob justice will soon be the only justice left.
Rick Taylor
Damn, John, don’t you have any compassion? These people are hurting!
Their weekend homes, John! How can you be so insensitive? It’s not like they’re free loaders, like that little kid and his parents.