Is this complicated?
If the credit markets fail entirely, some bad things will happen.
Consumers won’t be able to have credit cards (including the ones they already have).
Consumers won’t be able to borrow money to buy a car or truck. Neither will small businesses. Or large ones.
Students won’t be able to borrow money to go to college.
Large companies who have short-term debt (aka “commercial paper”) won’t be able to get new short-term debt and they will default. This will cause them to fail. They will then lay off a lot of people. Note: Most large companies have commercial paper.
Look - I get that people are angry at Wall Street. I am angry at Wall Street. But to view what is going on right now as a “bailout for Wall Street” at the expense of “Main Street” is asinine. Without the things that Wall Street does, Main Street doesn’t function. It might annoy you that Wall Street is full of overpayed douchebags who think they’re the masters of the universe. It annoys me. But recognize that this is way WAY past helping out the Wall Street firms.
Exactly.
I think we could also do a better job of explaining that it’s not $700 billion just being given away. We may make money on he deal. Nobody really knows. Or, at the very least, the financial industry can be made to reinburse the taxpayers via legislation that “recoups from the financial industry an amount equal to the shortfall in order to ensure that the Troubled Asset Relief Program does not add to the deficit or national debt.”
It is not perfect, but the amount of demagoguery against the plan is not justified given the alternative, in my opinion.
