Wednesday, November 26, 2008

The Solution to the Financial Crisis

Henry Paulson announced today that he is lending $800 Billion to himself, to end the financial crisis. Skepticism has been expressed, but Paulson says, "Please give my plan some time. Hey, it might work."

3 comments:

Martin Langeland said...

or how about this:
I've got a piece of paper I say is worth a cool Million bucks. Cause I like you I'll let you have it for $500,000.
Don't worry, you can borrow the Half mill from Izzy. Everybody's doing it.
So you do it a couple a more times and you can take another piece of paper and say it's worth Ten Million. Sell that to Joe Globotz for Five Mil he borrowed. Everybody's doing it. Pretty soon they'll call you a genius and name you Secretary of the Treasury and then you can deed yourself The Printing Press.

No worries ever again, right?
--ml

tobyr21@gmail.com said...

I've heard that one of the many problems with all those credit swaps was their secrecy. If they had all been publicly reported, a few million people would have warned the government that we were all in trouble.

Worse, from my point of view: The people who made credit swaps, assuming that they would always get the loaned money to pay their counter-debts, knew that they would profit at once from the swaps; let some idiot who comes later deal with the risk; better yet, let the company deal with the risk after they got their bonuses.
Grrrrr.....
-PB

Martin Langeland said...

Wealth discrimination requires secrecy, I think. Who gains he greatest advantage by hiding my pay check from common knowledge? Me? or the Employer who can play games with compensation that way?
When I work in situations where pay grades are established and published (e.g.: military or other government, union shops), I haven't noticed any diminution compared to jobs with secret compensation.
--m[