How's the Bailout Working For Us?

By Randall Hoven

Thankfully, our politicians passed the bailout. They ignored the ignorant voters and those "free market" Republican ideologues in the House. Look at the results in just the first few days afterward.

Within the first hours of the bailout passing, the Dow dropped about 300 points, or 3%.
Over the weekend, "London, Frankfurt and Paris all tumbled more than six percent approaching the half-way mark while a 15-percent dive in Moscow forced a halt to Russian trading."
"On Monday, Tokyo ended down 4.25 percent as Hong Kong's stock market shed 5.0 percent, Seoul tumbled 4.3 percent and Sydney lost 3.3 percent. Shanghai dived 5.23 percent and Mumbai was down 5.58 percent in late afternoon trade."
"European stocks plummeted after Germany's fourth biggest bank had to be rescued over the weekend."
"The Saudi stock market, the largest in the Arab world, shed 9.6 percent at the opening on Monday after a week-long holiday, and shares in other energy-rich Gulf states also slumped."
As I write on Monday, October 6, the Dow is down another 300 points.

All those free markets, from Europe and Asia to the Middle East and the US, are responding just as our experts predicted they would. Can you imagine if we hadn't passed the bailout? I daresay, the markets would have been down had that happened.

This also demonstrates the awesome powers of President Bush. He cannot only bring about terrorist attacks and hurricanes, he can bring about global financial collapse.

This apparently came about because of all that deregulation he fathered. You know, like Gramm-Leach-Bliley, that was signed into law by President Clinton and passed in the Senate by a vote of 90-8, including the votes of Chuck Schumer, John Kerry, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Dick Durbin, Tom Daschle and Joe Biden. Or the deregulation that exempted small thrifts from having to make loans to people who couldn't pay them back. As we can see from the results, those small thrifts lie at the center of this meltdown.

I sure hope we learned our lesson about deregulation and all that laissez-faire capitalism that had gripped the globe from Russia and Shanghai to Saudi Arabia and Paris.

Oops, the Dow is now down 400 points, below 10,000 now.