#862 Oily Rescue

As I write this, Wall Street is having a bit of an apocalypse. The four horsemen of market correction have mowed down major firms like equine tanks.
Doom and gloom are everywhere, and the treasury department and the president have asked the American taxpayer to finance a 700 billion dollar bailout. But with a twist.
Secretary of the Treasury Paulson asked for complete discretion in funds distribution and no oversight and requirements of him by anybody.
Sounds good to me.
Bail out the big boys who got caught with their hands in the cookie jar with one too many cookies, and do so using taxpayer money dispensed by the treasury secretary that didn’t have a clue the crisis was coming.
Sure, why not?
This from an administration that was for deregulation and keeping all federal hands out of big business. The same administration who constantly touted the benefit of cutting taxes.
Now he wants to in effect raise our taxes and use them to get the government involved in propping up a big boondoggle. If you changed boondoggle to bureaucracy he’d sound like what he says is a liberal.
Well, I have a better solution. It’s common in the investment world for one company that has a lot of money to invest in badly run companies that are failing. They buy the tarnished stock at a discount, fix the company, and build the stock value back up, benefiting investors that held on.
These are market forces. They need no regulation or interference. The French call it laissez-faire economics, although it often seems laissez-unfair.
So who has a lot of capital right now after gouging us for the last 18 months? Um, the oil companies? Right. Huge profits. 1200 bucks a minute there for a while.
Here’s what the government could do—broker a deal with the oil companies to buy up all the toxic mortgages. Those mortgages that still go into default leave the oil companies with the underlying land. So now they just don’t own all the oil. They own all the land too.
Then they can drill on that.
America, ya gotta love it.