I happened to see Steve Liesman, a CNBC "cast member" give this information — now in print form for your convenience! I normally disregard everything he says, in fact I switch channels or MUTE, but for what it's worth ...
What we are seeing is a bail-out of the richest individuals and corporations.
They make the rules, and their first rule is that they get bailed out first.
Excerpt: With Congress on the eve of passing a historic bill that would give the Treasury a blank check to lend money to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it’s worth looking at how much money the government has already pumped into the system during the housing crisis.
The numbers are staggering and likely to get much larger. What we have here is, through a variety of programs, a stealth bailout where more than a trillion dollars of taxpayer guarantees have been extended to the housing market, both to keep it going and to clean up the mess from the past.
I looked at the changes over the past year to the balance sheets of four governmental and quasi-governmental agencies — the Federal Reserve, the Federal Home Loan Banks, the Federal Housing Administration and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The objective was to see how much additional financing they have provided to the housing market. The total: $1.43 trillion. ...
Note that the $1.4 trillion does not include the latest trillion dollar bail-out bill in Congress, or the $165 billion tax "rebate" checks already sent to taxpayers.
In short, we're seeing an implosion of the American financial system. It is as if the financial system is a patient with a cut jugular vein spurting blood across the room and the Bush Regime has the patient hooked up to an IV with a needle the size of a firehose — instead of applying a tourniquet and attempting to halt the bleeding, they're pumping in more blood.
Why?
The answer lies in the Ponzi-style foundation of our financial system. Mr. Doug Noland explains
this week:
Excerpt: When I read the various estimates of the GSEs’ additional capital requirements, I again reflect back to one of the great flaws in economic historical revisionism with respect to the Great Depression. Conventional (“revisionist”) thinking today has it that if the Fed had simply “printed” $5bn and replenished lost banking system capital in the early thirties, the worst effects of the depression would have been avoided. But then, as is the case today, the size of lost financial sector “capital” was not the critical issue. Instead, financial sector losses pale in comparison to the huge scope of additional Credit creation necessary to sustain deeply maladjusted financial and economic structures — and the impossibility of sustaining Credit Bubble excess in the face of escalating risk intermediation losses and resulting tightened financial conditions, sinking asset prices, acute financial system impairment, investor and speculator revulsion, de-leveraging, major changes from boom-time spending patterns and economic downturn.
Treasury and the Fed could today easily “cut” Fannie and Freddie (and the FHLB!) a $20bn check or, ok, $50bn. Yet the reality of the situation is that GSE “Books of Business” must expand at least $600bn this year and then as much next year and the year after that… or very serious problems will unfold throughout the conventional mortgage marketplace. There are Minskian “Ponzi Finance” dynamics at work here, as there were in subprime, “private-label” MBS, CDO, auction-rate and other markets. Only the stakes of a conventional mortgage bust are much greater. ...
What we are seeing is a bail-out of the richest individuals and corporations. They make the rules, and their first rule is that they get bailed out first.
Recall that Barack Obama's healthcare plan was criticized for providing healthcare for all Americans who want it at a cost of $50 to $65 billion a year. But the Bush Regime has blown through trillions in just the last two years, and there is every indication that another trillion will be needed to keep this Ponzi system operational until Bush can escape office and head to Paraguay.
This means massive inflation is in the pipeline, along with continued dollar devaluation and sales of America capital assets to foreign entities (we're coming under new ownership — meet the new boss, same as the old boss.)
(The thing about insuring the uninsured which I never "got" until I tried to get insurance is that insurance policies are not available at any price for many people — you apply for coverage at say, Kaiser, and they don't say, "It will cost you $5,000 a month." They reject your application altogether. So if 46 million people are uninsured, that is the way Congress created the System. Imagine if auto insurance were "unavailable" for people who have had accidents...)
