This is why i hate tax law. it so damn complex and so vast and changes so often that being current is almost impossible unless your the one changing it. Not to mention that minor changes can reap huge rewards for those in the know.

this is also why i hate the bailout. its such a boondoggle. Do we have any idea if it is working at all? i mean we see the money go out and the market is still tanking. i thought the purpose of the bail out was short term stability and we would do something in the future to fix structural issues so what the hell is going on. cant these people just for once concentrate on fixing the country instead of giving away money to the rich?

How to loot the Treasury, in five easy lessons.

The Bush Kleptocracy will go down in history, as a lesson to be studied closely.

AIG was in Phoenix this week spending some of our money.

Gotta agree-- that's it for me. I'm against further bailouts, period. The money does not get to where it's supposed to go, kind of like the LAUSD (school district here).

The money just lines rich people's pockets.

As for the auto companies... they haven't made a decent car in 30 years. They wanted to keep mileage low, fought pollution standards, etc. They are at least l0 years behind the Japanese.

Let them fold. They deserve it.

Get Toyota and Honda to build plants here.

The new Bush chant:
2 more months! 2 more months!

I don't know if I can wait til January, democracy may be completely dead by then.

As a taxpayer, I want an ownership stake. These people leading AIG seem to want manage their business as usual, despite the enormity of their failures, take the taxpayer bailout as their due, and party on. Why are they getting away with it? Whose is playing their Santa Claus at our expense. I say lumps of coals for AIG management this year!

Another $40 billion for AIG? Gosh, it must be time for them to plan their Christmas party.

Here are a couple of modest proposals to restore some balance and common sense to the American corporate economy:

1. The Directors and the top three level of executives would forfeit all but $100K in benefits and other compensation for the previous three years if their corporation declares bankruptcy. I'm getting tired of executives granting themselves multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses and then taking the money and running, leaving employees and taxpayers to clean up the mess.

2. Executives and Directors of corporations should not have special devices like insurance trusts that act as pensions but which can't be touched by bankruptcy proceedings. And while it's not a good idea for government to prohibit particular kinds of compensation, the government can discourage them by making them not tax deductible and taxing the proceeds when they're cashed in at 90 percent.

Executives and Directors at a corporation should have to rely on the same pension that the give to their employees, then maybe they would take better care of it. It has become too common for employees' pension funds to simply disappear during a bankruptcy, when it's discovered that it wasn't invested properly. Pensions are contracts with employees, who accepted that benefit in lieu of salary. If a pension fund isn't there when bankruptcy is filed, then the executives and directors have committed fraud and should be prosecuted.

Who is getting all the money going to AIG? It's not staying with AIG, it's being used to pay off AIG's CDSs. So the money is ending up in the hands of hedge funds and others who made bad bets but are getting paid off anyway (at 100% on the dollar?). The banks aren't being nationalized, the Treasury Department is being privitized.

That's why I would like to see Warren Buffett as Treasury Secretary, because he would just set up the deals so that the Treasury, not the shareholders and executives of private corporations, made money in the end. Bush has set up welfare for rich Republicans.

It's the last few weeks at the trough, so expect a feeding frenzy.

Remember the good old days when the $1.5 billion Chrysler bail-out seemed uncomfortably large? (That would be around $4 billion in modern terms, and it was just a federal guarantee of loans, not money coming directly from the government.)

We have got to get over against our phobia over nationalization. Gordon Brown pulled the trigger, and it salvaged his political career. All Paulson is doing is perpetuating the environment of "privatization of profits, socialization of risk"; this is what happens when the people who caused the problem are put in charge of fixing it.

This is also why Summers should not even be allowed in the door of the Treasury department.

Sure, bail out any large financial institution with the understanding that any company accepting public bailouts will be broken into 4 smaller companies. 3 of which will then be small enough to die if they screw up again.

President Obama.... tie financial assistance to anti-trust enactment. See how eager they are to put their hands out.

I'd love to see the money being talked about for Detroit handed over to startups like Tesla and Scorpion. What could THEY do with the 40 billion I expect Ford and GM to waste on 'business as usual'?

And what exactly did you expect from Mr. Paulson, an exCEO? He gave his former employers a break by letting Lehman go under while supporting the people (AIG) that his own company depends on. He's a Republican so he has absolutely no respect for the law. By the same token he feels that the government exists solely for the personal benefit of his friends and himself. Looting the treasury is SOP. What did you think was going to happen? That the Bush administration was going to be a traitor to its class?

Maybe what we should do is shrink the private sector until it's small enough to drown in the bathtub. And let's throw in all the fat cats, too, and let them go down the drain, leaving the trillions behind for responsible people to invest in our future.

For the last 35 years the automakers have bribed congress to relax fuel economy standards.Now they want taxpayer money to build more fuel efficient vehicles.Let them fail. It's our only way out.

My takeaway from this is: Never again let a financial institution get so big or so intricately linked to other financial institutions that its failure could crash the system.

Something to bear in mind as Paulson & Co. use the bailout to create fewer, bigger banks.

"As for the auto companies... they haven't made a decent car in 30 years. They wanted to keep mileage low, fought pollution standards, etc. They are at least l0 years behind the Japanese.

Let them fold. They deserve it.

Get Toyota and Honda to build plants here."

I'm with ya, Clem2, but I have another idea:

Let GM/Chrysler die, then buy the assets on the cheap and offer the facilities to the first group that engineers a primarily electric car (with a liquid fuel backup system) that achieves practically zero emissions. Give the company a preferred equity interest, require that employees receive a meaningful equity ownership in the company and mandate quality controls on a par with the good car makers. Structure the deal as an earn-out where the company eventually privatizes through buying the assets over time with interest.

For those screaming "Socialism!", the government would remain mostly passive, only requiring that management stick to the business plan or confer on substantive strategic deviations.

It's time to give someone else a chance. Personally, I think a number of engineers who have been quashed over the years by sr. management could probably deliver the goods.

Let 'em ALL fail.

Big Corporations have been robbing this nation for decades, it's time to turn off the tap. They don't PAY taxes, but they sure as hell want our tax money to keep their pockets full!

New Talking Point for the Boardroom Class in their NEW jobs: "Would you like Fries with that?"

Let 'em fail, and sell 'em off in bite-sized pieces to Owner-Proprietors instead. Maybe the New (non-corporate) Owners (of the assets we have paid for repeatedly) will build a product (here in the US) that will outlast the warranty for a change.

And, just think – Crazy Uncle Henry, six weeks ago, was rumored to be Obama's choice to stay on at Treasury. Ummm, smell the Change(TM).

Hot off Drudge:

Fed refusing to give info about Bailout recipients:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aatlky_cH.tY&refer=worldwide

eff drudge.

if it's true, the information will be available elsewhere.

"Let them fold. They deserve it."

I wish we could. There's no doubt they deserve it. The 'Big 3' is like a drug addict we continue to enable. Unfortunately, it's just not that simple.

There are about $1 trillion in credit default swaps bet on GM. Most of the bets will be hedged, but if even a tiny amount of the positions taken are exposed it can cause a cascade of companies to go under as each business failure leads to more unsecured CDS contracts coming due, which causes more business failures, triggering more unsecured CDS contracts, leading to more bankruptcies...