Have you gotten these emails from various spam-like sites advising you to make sure you get "your piece of the government bailout pie"? If ever there were a reason to be suspicious of a government that promises it is "here to help," this appears to be it. It is common knowledge that TARP funds, named to allegedly direct my bank to relieve itself of the "troubled assets" it purchased (in between buying companies, paying bonuses to executives, and spinning off commissions to the Birkenstock-clad mortgage broker), has not really gone to buy any such "troubled assets." Because the first hastily-passed Act did not tell the banks what to do with this money, now we have to set up a "bad bank" to buy bad assets, and we have to pay for that - again.
Mind you, these banks are the same ones that 9 months ago denied me credit when I went to refinance my line to take out the portion I incurred to open our Berkeley office. I have an 800 credit score, which apparently does not qualify me for 'stupid money.' I have to apply for normal money using normal channels, which means that no government has guaranteed my loan in the event of my default. (That is, the lender has to actually bear the default risk. What is banking coming to?)
So now my bankers, who turned down The Myers Law Firm on its fairly straightforward request to convert a working line to a term loan, are now using the taxes that The Myers Law Firm and its employees have paid the US Government to pay their senior executives lavish bonuses. I am wondering, you know, if I got a bonus for NOT selling my troubled assets to the government as planned, for NOT loaning money to a creditworthy business to refinance its working line of credit, can I apply for bailout money, too? It would be like me NOT doing work and then asking the client to pay anyway since I am incompetent and they need me to stay in business or otherwise I will destroy their file. (Don't worry, clients, this would be illegal, unethical, and most importantly, immoral - although unfortunately the concept of personal conscience is missing from the debate these days.)
According to the daily spam collected in my new spam filter (which I don't believe), I might actually be able to qualify. However, I am a bit worried that the criteria for receipt of funds seems to be incompetence. How's that for incenting America? If only I could demonstrate poor business judgment, then it would be my turn to get some of that hardly-earned cash.
Under Bush, you could get money if you did something really productive, like make guns and bombs or sell bad food to NGO combatants. Or show up at the airport with a wheelbarrow while the bails of cash were being thrown onto the transport. At least with Bush, the cloak of secrecy left no record of which incompetent crony ended up with undeserved cash for all to read about in the New York Times. Transparency, for all its benefits, reminds us how badly we are being taken.
Our downtrodden institutions of finance are shameless. Executives at Merrill Lynch are taking their money in the sunshine. Don't they know of the thieves' honor code to conceal criminal activity?
One more example before I need to purge. AIG. Now here's an insurance company that for years (while I was a tort plaintiff's lawyer, anyway) was paying defense attorneys more money to defend legitimate claims than the amount that was being claimed by the injured victim. The basis for these uneconomic decisions were that it would only encourage more victims to hire more lawyers and make more claims and on and on. Mind you, it takes accidents and injuries to create victims, and the last I checked there was not a lot of supply-side elasticity to the "injured victim" pool (although now I understand many national banks have claimed the title). OK, fine, I thought, if the insurance company wants to make a bad economic decision, that is their problem. I don't need to invest in AIG; I can simply say it is their prerogative to make poor business decisions.
But alas, it is no longer their problem. It is, once again, my problem, because I am a taxpayer and they are "too big to fail." Interesting that they weren't too big to crush my client-victims with piles of irrelevant interrogatories and a battery of high-paid big-firm defense lawyers.
Ok, I think its time to purge. On a happy note, Wells Fargo recently advised me that they would entertain my request to refinance my line of credit - at 11%. I couldn't help but wonder how much of that goes to service their below-market debt to Uncle Sam and how much of that goes to bonus their senior executives . . .
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