Maybe I missed something in Civics 101, but if we're to call it the "Bush bailout plan", wouldn't that intimate that Bush initiated the plan? As I understand it, this bailout plan was initiated by democrats in the congress...no? Therefore, wouldn't it be more accurate to call it the "Reid bailout plan" or the "Pelosi bailout plan"?
Again, perhaps I missed something (I have been VERY busy with work lately), I seem to recall that the AIG part of the "bailout" was to be an 8% loan rather than a "bailout". As far as Fannie and Freddie, frankly I'd be VERY happy to see them come back under full governmental control, and as a line item on the Federal Budget, or better yet killed outright.
I have a close friend who owned an automobile dealership for several decades, and one of the things that they used to do was to guarantee the loans on the cars they sold. If the person they sold the car to defaulted on the bank loan, the bank called him for the money, and it was up to him to either make the payments or repossess the car and sell it to someone who would make the payments. If we're going to ever have a solid home mortgage system again, the mortgage brokers are going to have to be required to do the same thing, guarantee their own loans, instead of doing the thing that got us into this mess in the first place, namely loaning money on the same property...twice! The MBS system allowed banks to write a mortgage to someone, and then to write bonds using the property as security! When you couple that with the ARM's, and "interest only" scams that were running rampant a few years ago, is it any wonder that these companies are going down like a MIG with an AMRAAM up it's tailpipe?
