Economics

Yahoo! Finance | Ben Stein | Oct. 6, 2008

1) Have a fiscal policy that creates immense deficits in good times and bad, burdening America’s posterity with staggering burdens of repaying the debt.

2) Eliminate regulation of Wall Street and/or fail to enforce the regulations that already exist, instead trusting Wall Street and other money managers and speculators to manage other people’s money with few or no regulations and little oversight.

3) Have an energy policy that disallows producing our own energy and instead requires that we buy energy from abroad, thus making our oil prices highly volatile and creating large balance of payments deficits, lowering the value of the dollar and thus making the problem get progressively worse.

4) Have Congress mandate that banks and other financial entities lend money to persons they know in advance to have poor credit ratings or none at all. [Read more…]

Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council | Raymond J. Keating | September 26, 2008

When it comes to tallying up the federal government’s recent bailout announcements, the numbers are so staggering that they might seem unreal to many people.

For Bear Stearns: $29 billion.
For Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: $200 billion.
For AIG: $85 billion.

And now, of course, Washington debates Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s $700 billion to bailout financial firms that made bad debt decisions.

That’s $1.014 trillion in taxpayer money placed at risk. (And there’s the $25 billion loan package-bailout moving through the Congress for automakers.) Unfortunately, since there is no substantive analysis to back up the $700 billion the Treasury wants, the bill may go even higher.

But let’s take $1 trillion as the number for now, and put it in perspective. For example:
[Read more…]