Run for the exits

... OR if you like roller coasters buckle down for the ride of your life. Holy popcorn batman. Did you guys listen to the Senate Banking committee hearing with Paulson and Bernanke? I am sure you can find some great articles on it today but for god's sake. Politicians just suck. They know there is urgent need for about a trillion dollars of bad-dept buyout and they're trying to add all sorts of earmarks to it. Trouble is, when a credit squeeze happens, it's not like cancer, where it kills you like over 6 years, it's more like a heart attack, which kills you within 1 day. The effect is going to be immediate and widespread. If they keep dragging their feet and making statements like:

"What (Treasury Secretary Paulson) is saying here is, this program that they think is very important, we need it to get the economy out of the doldrums. But if it is going to nick (corporate executives ) of a couple of million of the many millions that they already have, they are going to boycott it. I hope they are not that selfish and unpatriotic." Rep. Frank

"What the Secretary put on the table is a proposal—we're examining that proposal. You can tell that a lot of people are not satisfied with the proposal... When you're going to [use] $700 billion, on top of other money, we want to know: "Will this do it? And what's the worse case scenario?" He didn't answer the questions because he didn't know." Sen. Shelby

"There has been a good deal of skepticism, certainly about a blank check on both sides of the aisle. So clearly, Secretary Paulson is going to have to modify his plan significantly. The good news is, they do seem open to changes. So I suggested two, just to protect the taxpayers." Sen. Schumer

I wasn't too worried until today. Now it seems to me that the house and the senate have no real intention of passing any sort of aid with any urgency. All the talk today was of the variety of: Well we've told the market we're going to help, so now that they now that they can relax and wait until we come up with something better. Give me a break. Let me put it to you this way, here is what we're dealing with. We're all in a very fast sports car that we bought we money we didn't have. The car is going very very fast. We just realized that we're headed for a brick wall and our brakes do not work. We have to engage the emergency brakes. At these speeds though, using the emergency brakes is going to damage the car considerably and we might still hit the wall kinda hard and damage our very expensive car. BUT, if we don't use the brakes at all, well, then we're going to hit that wall at full speed. But what I haven't told you, is that this particular brick wall is built at the edge of the grand canyon, and at these speeds we'll break right through that wall and fly off the edge and disintegrate at the bottom of the canyon. Trouble is, the house and senate think that this crash is going to end at the wall and they can just put in some money to buy a new car later and we're all not likely to die from a crash into the wall. I guess no one has told them about the canyon. No amount of money will fix anything once we break through the wall. Call your representative and scream at them.

Let me be clear. Even though the near trillion dollars is from tax payer money. It's not going to be wasted. It's going to buy bad debt at pennies on the dollar. That's a great deal for the taxpayer. They get to buy distressed loans at VERY low dollar prices. Warren Buffet is salivating at the mouth for this. I'm going to go find some xanax now.

See the blog on http://dollarone.blogspot.com/