Uncle Sam to the rescue

Rubi Martinez

Look, is that a bird? No, is it a plane? No, it is Uncle Sam! Sure, it is more like Super Sam, but in this case, he is rewarding the evil bankers with a $700 billion bailout package.

We are ask to shed out of our pockets $700 billion to clean up the costly mess left by Wall Street, but shouldn’t this money go toward improving the health-insurance system or education? Why put it in greedy hands? This is not the right call.

The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, best known as the $700 billion bailout, was passed earlier this month by the Senate, 72 votes to 25, and by the House, 263 to 171.

President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson proposed the act in response to the global financial crisis.

The goal of the bailout package is to buy trouble or “toxic” mortgages from banks and resell them to investors, as well as to get banks to start lending to each other again and restore confidence in the credit market.

The downside of it is that we do not know the current value of those mortgages and we have no idea if we are getting our investments back. Forget any profits, or if this “bailout” — which I see as total burglary — will in fact work.

I keep asking myself, what happened to all the economists and investors over on Wall Street? Is it not their job to predict losses and gains as accurately as possible to make a profit? Didn’t they get an idea where the market was heading?

Sure, symptoms were shown a long time ago, but why wasn’t anything done before getting to this point?

Let us not blame it all on the Wall Street bankers who over-leverage their companies, but also on Americans who have been living beyond our means, asking for more than we can afford and contributing to the “inflation of the bubble.”

Rubi Martinez ()

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