The Fed’s plan to bailout indebted consumers and mortgage holders may sound impressive on paper (remember when $800 billion sounded like a lot of money), but it may just be “spitting in the wind.”
It’s even easier to write off China. But Keith Fitzgerald says China’s stimulus package, unlike America’s, is large enough to work. Expect an uptick in Chinese demand in late 2009 and an acceleration in 2010.
The record drop in consumer spending in October is clear evidence of a profound weakening of the US economy. Even President Bush think thinks the situation is bad. At the G20 summit over the weekend, he said it was conceivable that the US “could go into a depression greater than the Great Depression“.
Really. It’s too much. Yesterday, George W. Bush told foreign leaders “Our aim should not be more government, It should be smarter government.” Didn’t Bush just spend the past eight years embodying the exact opposite? Where was the smart part creating an “ownership society” with phony money? Where was the smart part of running up record deficits? Or the war in Iraq?
$5 trillion. That’s how much it has cost so far to bailout out corporate America from its own stupidity, greed and corruption (yes, Fannie and Freddie, that means you). Or to put it another way, the US government in its eternal wisdom has now put the American taxpayer on the hook for $5,000,000,000,000.
Remember the hullabaloo over the $700 billion bailout? The bill that would buy “troubled assets” from banks (hence the name). Well, guess what? TARP never did buy troubled assets…and probably never will. Instead, it will continue to inject capital into companies in return for equity.
Short-term aid, long-term assistance. According to the IHT, this sums up Barack Obama’s attitude toward the government’s role in the US auto industry. Obama is pushing President Bush to use some of the $700 billion bailout package to prop up GM (NYSE:GM).
U.S. stocks futures fell this morning despite yesterday’s barnstormer rally and heavy hints of a further rate cut by the Fed. “S&P 500 futures dropped 21 points to 917.70 and Nasdaq 100 futures fell 32.5 points to 1,275.50. Dow industrial futures dropped 200 points to 8,889.00,” according to MarketWatch.
The world’s banks and lenders have suffered losses of $2.8 trillion as a result of the credit crisis, according to the Bank of England. The British central bank is calling for “tougher regulation and constraints on lending,” according to The Guardian.
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and even the mighty Dubai are getting dragged down by the global economic turmoil. “The global financial storm rolled across the Persian Gulf on Sunday,” reports the WSJ, “as Kuwait’s central bank guaranteed bank deposits and cobbled together a hasty bailout for one of the country’s largest banks.”