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Diceman

Bill Eisenhood


Last Updated: 11/23/2009

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Gender: Male
Status: Divorced
Age: 66
Sign: Cancer

City: ALBUQUERQUE
State: New Mexico
Country: US
Signup Date: 9/17/2005
Saturday, February 14, 2009 

January 25:  So I'm having lunch with a friend who used to frequent my craps
table and the Ultimate Texas Holdem tables. He a real estate investor,
and about a year ago I was seriously considering investing a large
chunk of my retirement money with him. It would have helped finance a
housing development and shopping center in a town where uranium mining
was making a big comeback, helped along by ever-increasing oil prices.
He got hammered pretty good by the recent crash, and, though he wasn't
wiped out, he's been 'treading water' for some time now. So our
conversation naturally turned to the economy. I started ranting about
the Merrill Lynch chief who'd been fired the day before for, among
other things, losing $15 billion, and, at the same time, handing out
around $4 billion in bonuses to his top ranked lieutenants. Jon stopped
me short. I'm not sure I find that much fault with that, he said. After
all, he was taking care of his employees, guys who may have been
guaranteed big payments for some time. Maybe not. But then Jon got all
wound up: Why not give all that bailout money to the PEOPLE - you and
me! Here's why. Let's say Joe owes a bank $10,000 and you're
behind in your payments and behind on your mortgage to boot. Now if you
give the bailout money to the bank they may or may not feel ok about
loaning it out again. Meanwhile, Joe still owes the money and he's
still behind on his mortgage. If Joe gets foreclosed and/or defaults on
his ten grand loan, his credit is ruined, the bank eats the paper and
now owns a house they didn't want. Two years from now Joe still can't
borrow any money because he's such a shitty credit risk. But,
Jon says, if you give Joe the money, let's say it's $10,000 per
household, then he fends off foreclosure and keeps making payments on
his note. The bank ends up getting the money anyway and Joe's credit is
preserved - everybody wins. I had to hand it to Jon, his argument made
a lot of sense to me, who knows little about economics. So I call my
son Charlie in New York, where he's majoring in economics at NYU. He
says no, experts agree (Hah!) that you get the most 'bang for your
buck' if you give the bailout money to the financial institutions - the guys who fucked the whole thing up in the first place.
So who's right, Jon the speculator or my kid the student? I gotta tell
you, Jon's argument makes more sense every day. I'm coming to believe
that the conventional wisdom is a very large load of horseshit! Time to write my congressman. Oh wait - he's full of shit too!



6:47 AM
 
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