Email Transaction Between My Dad and I on the American Government Investing in Bank Stocks

Dave,

I see Bush announced buying equity shares in banks on a temporary basis a few minutes ago. That is the UK solution now adopted by the G7 and G20. Brown is a financial wizard if not the classy Tony Blair so far as communicating and doing the social thing. When the banks recover they can buy back the shares from the government, giving the taxpayer profits on the risk. It is the lack of capital, lost from escalating and now plunging housing values, that needs shoring up don't you think? Dad

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Hi Dad,

I'm all for the 'government investment' policy being put in place -- the government buying stocks in the banks -- and then selling them back -- or not -- and ideally making a profit that can help start bringing down the American ('multi'?) trillion dollar debt...What I don't want to see is the main people responsible for this fiasco becoming rich off it. I think that their crimes are much worse than Conrad Black's (Black's didn't bring down the whole world economy to its knees nor tragically influence so many American people who bought homes with mortgages that had fraudulant 'trojan viruses' buried in them....)

These 'pirates' should be either jailed or at least not be allowed to profit from what they did. Ideally, as well as being jailed (or at least some of them) they should lose money big time from what they did. 'What goes around comes around' in a 'free market' and for all those who wanted 'no regulations', they should be 'given the full freedom of what 'the free market with no regulations' actually means -- to feel the full pain of what comes back in their faces when they bilk millions of dollars from the American people in the pursuit of unbridled greed -- not to be bailed out by their government cronies with billions of more American dollars when their greed starts to backfire and affect them in the only place they understand -- their bank accounts and wallets).

And how about those AIG people who went out immediately after learning of the bailout (or getting part of it) and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at a 'spa retreat'.

Don't they get it? Obviously they don't. How can they unless and/or until they feel the same type of pain that they caused?

There has to be a strong deterrent for others not to follow this same path.

America -- and I include here Canada as well because I experience it every day I go to work -- has to re-learn the difference between 'narcissistic, unethical Capitalism' and 'ethical, humanistic-existential Capitalism'. Unless there are strong deterrents against the manipulation of ethical Capitalism into unethical Capitalism, unethical Capitalism will just keep on happening in a thousand different variations on the same theme. It's just like freedom and democracy in this respect. Each have to be fought for -- and I don't mean killed for except in the most extreme of cases -- but just strongly argued for, through the dialectic, each and every day. Otherwise, freedom, democracy, and ethical Capitalism will all pass the same way as the dinosaur. And self-destruct just like in the Fall of Rome.

That is my opinion on this matter.

dave


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No argument on any of these points. None. Dad