No the sound you hear following the silence is the high, shrill whine of the phone on the other end melting from the heat of the fireball that is engulfing the United States economy. The sound after that is the sound of your IRAs and 401(k)s shrieking in Boschian agony as they are skinned alive and pulled apart in different directions by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (War, Famine, Death, and Pestilence).
So AIG, the company with a $6-billion dollar Market Cap and 116-thousand employees, gets a ticket to ride—an $85-BILLION dollar ticket, to bail it out. I smell a trend here.
Bear Stearns gets a handout so it could be bought out by J. P. Morgan. (“But we had to—the country couldn’t afford to let Bear Stearns go under! It would be calamitous!”)
Shearson Lehman and Merrill Lynch declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sunday. (The news always comes out on a Sunday when everyone is boating or barbecuing, you ever notice that?)
Washington Mutual (WaMu), the world’s largest savings and loan, is now teetering on the brink of myocardial infarction as well, and may be the next bank “too big to fail.” Or will it be Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs?
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the helping hand in private enterprise behind millions of home mortgages in these United States, was taken over by the Federal government last weekend. (Ironically enough, VP Candidate Sarah McPalin seems to think it has “been a burden on U.S. taxpayers.” Well, it wasn’t until the government stepped in, and now we all have to pay for the predatory lending subprime mortgage crisis by bailing out the FNMA and FHLMC.
Oh, and let’s not forget Countrywide, the mortgage broker who made all the predatory sub-prime loans that helped run this DUI bus off the cliff to the tune of $4.1 billion of your hard-earned tax dollars.
Every single solitary day 7000 homes in America are going into foreclosure.
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