This bailout plan is the worst thing we could have done

Good luck to those people. This government plan to spend a massive amount of THEIR money is going to keep the economy in a quagmire for the next decade, adding that to their depressed home values (depressed off a market bubble). So now they can count on rising unemployment added to the decrease they have seen in their housing values. They should be more pissed than anyone. A bad economy that may have lasted 18 months is now sure to last a decade, and be worse than it would have been.

Once again, your post is symptomatic of "everyone has to be winner." A lot of those people bought homes at the peak of the housing market. Nothing in the contract guaranteed that prices would continue to soar out of control. Anyone with their feet grounded in reality should have predicted that prices would correct. Your house value wasn't going to double in value every few years, which was what had been happening when they bought. Anyone who counted on that probably wasn't qualified for home ownership. No one forced any of those people who took loans they couldn't afford, with little down, to finance a house they couldn't afford, either. No one guaranteed that economic cycles would suddenly stop playing out and that we would see strong economic growth for eternity. The economy sees booms and busts. When it heats, it heats too much, and then corrects and when it corrects, it corrects too much and starts to heat. It is the way it always has been and always will. And no one told them to take ARMS with an escalation after three years that would put their payments into a place they were never going to be able to afford.

Of course those people see the bailout as a positive. They are the same people who made bad decisions when buying a home, without thinking a few years ahead and saying, "How am I going to pay for this?" They are not thinking that today either.

A depressed housing market that very likely would have been on the way to recovery in two years from now, and a bad economy that was surely going to see layoffs either way, versus a depression that might last a decade and depress the economy way worse than it would have, because of the long-term consequences of this horrible choking off of our financial markets. Those people on Staten Island, if they really think this bailout is a good idea, just don't get it.

 

deskslave, you are paying in the form of that $700 billion of spending, but you are going to pay in a much worse way. This is going to have disastrous effects on our economy. The GOVERNMENT created this crisis. The financial markets would have gotten rid of the dead weight on their own and rewarded people smart enough to make good decisions. But when the government set that precedent with Bear Stearns, it set expectations, and then when they proclaimed a crisis, they spooked all faith in people who lend money and caused short-term loans to dry up with their stupid, self-serving, panicked rhetoric. No one was panicking 6 months ago and nothing is different today than it was then! They created a crisis and then get to act like they solved it.

Now they will allay some of the fears and the financial markets will recover -- in the short term -- from a crisis THEY created. Beyond that, they just set the stage for economic malaise that will last 3 or 4 times longer than the recession we were going to have to suck up either way. That could be significantly longer, too, if they continue to do more stupid things like this.

That's how you are going to pay. With high unemployment that will seemingly never come to an end and depending on external factors, possibly stagflation if enough of the emerging markets recover or we see some other kind of oil squeeze that drives inflation.

This is just horrible and too many people don't get it.