Bailout Poem
April 5, 2008 5:15pm by Barry Ritholtz
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Hi,
I liked your comments in todays NYTimes Business. Everywhere I read its the same story, stocks will go higher!!? How on earth can Amazon.com continue to go higher when we are in the midst of a major consumer led recession? WHY ARE money managers telling their clients to pour money into those types of stocks?????? WHY??
Yep.
Hey Barry, Maudlin is saying nice things about you.
I’m not a forelorn home owner…
but… I didn’t get a bailout package?
Oh, is that $600 supposed to be it?
All this bad news and we are less than 12% from the all time high on the S&P and DOW and heading higher. That wasn’t so bad at all now was it. (sarcasm ended)
barry ritholtz? please read the story on the drudgereport.com…..bloggers are dropping dead…..go easy …we would all miss you!
~~~
BR: Thats not the Drudge report, its the front page of the Sunday NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/technology/06sweat.html
All you pessimists better watch yourselves.
If you don’t believe, the evil-doers WIN!
Q. What is the sound of one tax rebating??
$167B divided by the number of working
Americans is $1320 per working person,
for our mislabeled “tax rebate”, which,
in fact, is merely a loan against SSTF,
(and which we will have to pay taxes on
the “windfall rebate” next year anyway.)
But wait! $1320 loan to yourself, from
proceeds already paid by a delayed AMT,
yet the IRS rebate check says only $600,
and for the medians of US, only $300!!!
The Treasury’s origination fee is 75%!!!
That’s usury in any land, in any period.
And we will pay interest on that spread
or our children will, until 2999 comes.
So if our CiC can’t grow deficits (and the
Fed interest penalty thereon) directly by
cutting taxes, what better way than float
“rebates”! Next year IRS will double-down,
then double-down again, until SSTF is gone,
and our kids are wearing Saudi dog collars.
But DOW is up! And Fed killed the Bears!!
Whoo-hoo, it just don’t get better’n that!
Love it Muriel, and so true except for the taxes due on the rebate bit: According to the IRS there will be no taxes due on the rebate per se but you better keep a copy of the IRS letter you receive later in the year listing the amount of your payment.
But that’s picayune, it’s just getting our own money back with Bush’s ejaculate on it and we’ll pay in a thousand other ways later while our feckless leadership continues to steer us down the tubes so fast that a real question arises as to whether our kids will even earn dog collars, Saudi or otherwise (not that Muslims think much of dogs to begin with), or whether they’ll just have to be sold into the market for human spare parts: Another free market and libertarian wet dream coming soon to a neighborhood near you; do you (like it yet) Mr. Jones?
or the markets ain’t heading any higher. Stop crying over suckers rallys. Then they fall below 12,000 again.
«our kids will even earn dog collars, Saudi or otherwise (not that Muslims think much of dogs to begin with), or whether they’ll just have to be sold into the market for human spare parts: Another free market and libertarian wet dream coming soon to a neighborhood near you; do you (like it yet) Mr. Jones?»
Which reminds me of “A Modest Proposal” or two that I come up with recently, that would save the USA from the exploitative grasp of the corrupt and parasitical low productivity classes:
* Tax incomes below $30,000 at 50%, those below $60,000 at 25%, those below $200,000 at 15%, 0% for income between $200,000 and $1m, an EITC of 10% for income above $1m. This would surely incentivize everybody to raise their income instead of enjoying the parasitical, exploitative luxury of being poor, and would reward with an EITC those with the highest productivity that make the highest contribution to the GDP of the USA.
* Withdraw USA citizenship from the “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks”, the exploitative and parasitical, luxury loving lazy poor generating less than $30,000 in value, and give them illegal immigrant status, and perhaps honorary Mexican citizenship as more befitting. Also commute the citizenship to Puerto Rican of those generating less than $60,000 in value as they are not pulling their weight and contributing enough to the wealth of the USA.
These two elements of “A Modest Proposal” would eliminate the issue of poverty in the USA, and the immoral exploitation by parasites of those who truly make America great, the winners like Mozilo, ONeill and Rayne who have create immense amounts of value, a significant chunk of which is currently being STOLEN by a corrupt government to help out un-American losers.
Ah I was forgetting: to mandate a policy of “always low interest rates” for Fed*mart loans to the businesses run by winners, deserving American citizens who are generous Republican campaign sponsors, because winning businesses and their management deserve encouragement.
BTW, for the humour impaired, my “A Modest Proposal” above is sarcasm. I just hope it does not become the new official Movement aim, even if it is entirely consistent with their outlook.
Anyhow, the poem above seems to me to be quite misleading dishonest, because “Jack” is depicted as an innocent victim. Many or most “Jacks” seem to me to have been fraudsters or speculators or often both, with liar loans and the counting on “greater fool” theory.
The victims in this giant Ponzi scheme of “Always low interest rates. Always.” by the Fed*mart and the rest of the conservative establishment have not been the “Jack”s; the “Jack”s who have suffered are simply those that have been too late to join the wave of fraud and speculation, plenty of “Jack”s who have gotten in early have made out like bandits (quite).
The victims here are those who *have not participated* in the giant government sponsored, Wall Street run, Ponzi scheme designed by the Business Roundtable: the stupid suckers, the hopeless losers who have saved money, who have worked hard, who are paying taxes to bail out everybody else, who cannot afford current house prices, whose financial assets are going to be shredded by the coming inflation to save the owners and speculators on real assets, those who have been too poor to get into the game.
These are un-American losers, they are the new Indians, and thus deserving to be expropriated to the benefit of the winners. The “Jack”s depicted above are those who were late to join the scheme, not the designated victims of the scheme.
«WHY ARE money managers telling their clients to pour money into those types of stocks?????? WHY??»
First of all the compensation of financial intermediaries is a function of beta, that is in effect of churn. More churn, more money for the winners of Wall Street. Only suckers hope to make money on alpha.
The other reason is more meritorious and subtle: where else would you put that money? Something that most people forget is that absolute returns are usually a pipedream, and what matters is relative returns. That is, on the aggregate, you can choose where to put your money, not how much it earns. In practice this is a choice between asset classes and withing asset classes as to sectors.
The biggest “relative value” play is between bonds and stocks, but of course cash and commodities are alternatives too. Right now, if you expect bankruptcies to rise, inflation to go up, and interest rates to stay low but then to rise in a few years in a “Volcker Strikes Back” sort of movie, bonds looks like a very bad idea, and by comparison stocks of companies with real assets and some pricing power thanks to real sales look good. Cash looks good only if you expect the government to respect savers instead of bailing out debtors (fat chance) and the dollar not to fall, and commodities look good only if you think that China and India are unstoppable, or the dollar to fall a lot.
So perhaps now stocks are the best of a bad lot, because I think that the most likely scenarios are runaway inflation (if Wall Street can continue to buy it from politicians) or just stagflation.
And then the thieves lived happily ever after. The End!
Yeah, that housing “bailout” bill which is being bantered about in the Senate is ALL about helping average Americans isn’t it? There’s just about something for everyone ex-Jack as the cartoon implies.
Mr. Shelby said “Americans should be heartened. We are going to work in a bipartisan way to tell the American people that we have heard from you.”
Really? And this is your answer??
On MadTV this weekend, they had a sketch, “Fun with Stock Footage: Buildings”. They show a dilapidated house with a missing roof. The two voiceovers are a realtor and a buyer. The realtor is selling like crazy, while the buyer is puzzled and questioning. The buyer says I have a family and really need a roof. The realtor is all smiles and cheery. The back and forth salespitch goes on. Finally, the buyer exclaims, but isn’t that an exposed gas pipe, at which time the house explodes. Sometime comedy makes reality palatable, and sometimes that’s the way truth is revealed.
If you had any sort of savings, what you gained from the tax rebate is lost in interest income, therefore the tax rebate is a non-event.