I think some of the stuff FDR tried to do was evil. Put "packing the Supreme Court" right at the top of the list. It's not a small list, either. But neither was everything he did bad - though some, in retrospect, made things worse, not better. Hindsight is 20/20, and we can learn both from his successes and his failures. Problem is, we're ignoring a bunch of lessons, both from FDR and from other, similar scale messes (JAPAN).
I'm not so sure I prefer the equity option for TARP. Frankly, I've been looking at what the banks refer to as "toxic assets" and drooling. At book rate, wouldn't touch 'em. Discount 'em so they'll market, and there's frankly a LOT of money to be made. I've been offered multi-million $ portfolios of bad debt that I would have _loved_ to buy, at the price offered (70% discount from face). I could have kept, oh, 80-90% of those people in their homes, and _still_ made money hand over fist. Didn't have the $16m required to play. But if I can do it, you're damn skippy the feds could to. They could _make a profit_ on the deal even. Instead, we got the worst of both worlds - no unfrozen credit, but huge raids on the public fisc.
The value of your house, to be quite honest, has depressed enough to get it back into reality. Overall, long-term growth average for Bay Area real estate is right about 7%. And in that I'm talking about a 100 year average. So if you got 3-4 years of 20-40% growth... why don't you think you'll have to cough it up? [more]
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Date: 2009-04-17 01:34 am (UTC)I'm not so sure I prefer the equity option for TARP. Frankly, I've been looking at what the banks refer to as "toxic assets" and drooling. At book rate, wouldn't touch 'em. Discount 'em so they'll market, and there's frankly a LOT of money to be made. I've been offered multi-million $ portfolios of bad debt that I would have _loved_ to buy, at the price offered (70% discount from face). I could have kept, oh, 80-90% of those people in their homes, and _still_ made money hand over fist. Didn't have the $16m required to play. But if I can do it, you're damn skippy the feds could to. They could _make a profit_ on the deal even. Instead, we got the worst of both worlds - no unfrozen credit, but huge raids on the public fisc.
The value of your house, to be quite honest, has depressed enough to get it back into reality. Overall, long-term growth average for Bay Area real estate is right about 7%. And in that I'm talking about a 100 year average. So if you got 3-4 years of 20-40% growth... why don't you think you'll have to cough it up?
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