"Come September" means it's "FALL."Were these Natalie Imbruglia lyrics prophetic or what ?
"Her bones will ache Her mouth will shake And as the passion dies
Her magic heart will break She'll fly to France.Cause there's no chance
No hope for Cinderella Come September."
Nevertheless I’m so grateful to US President George W. What’s-his-face who asked Congress for $ 700 billion to bail out failed US financial institutions by buying up their worthless mortgages and other bad debts. Even though it was rejected by the US House of Representatives it was a bold and innovative plan.
The federal government has already pledged more than $600 billion in the past year to bail out, or help bail out, some of the biggest names in American finance. That includes the rescue of investment bank Bear Stearns in March, the takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac earlier this month and the takeover of the world's largest insurance company, American International Group, just this week.
Why just yesterday Washington Mutual, America’s largest Savings and Loan and the 6th largest US bank has been seized and its assets sold to J.P Morgan.
I’m told that the severance package for WaMu CEO Fishman alone amounts to almost $13 mil. This will ensure that his lifestyle will remain unchanged, his kids will continue their education in Ivy League schools, and his Malibu Home with its heated swimming pool and his wife’s Porsche will not be repossessed. What fun!
I’m sure this bailout would have sufficed to straighten out the world economy.
Several other world leaders were also concerned as was evinced by the President of Brazil when asked about the crisis. He said, “What crisis? Go ask Bush.” He too is confident that George W. is fully capable of managing the present world economic crisis just as well as he is handling the crisis in the Middle East, namely Iraq.
Jon Stewart of the Daily Show elucidates this point very clearly in this clip
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=186052&title=clusterf#@k-to-the-poor-house.
I had been meaning to do something about it myself, but I cannot seem to find the time given that Goa has been having a lot of rain lately and my mother-in-law is visiting.
Anyway with such a load on my mind I cannot possibly deal with the world economic crisis, so I’m glad that the world leader in the entertainment industry, also considered bailing out American mismanaged private enterprise just to prove that it can abandon capitalism and embrace socialism when it so chooses.
I heard that this would have cost the average American Taxpayer an additional $7000.00 in taxes, but given American largesse as portrayed by CNN and Hollywood this, in Neil Armstrong’s words is, “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” or “a small price to pay for saving the world and the American way.” or.... oh never mind, it’s a moot point now.
The Americans were also faced with having to deal with some very complex issues.
For example they had to decide which of the CEO’s of these failed institutions would get a Congressional Ticket and wide-ranging debates on whether they should have red wine or white with their lobster-dinner fund-raisers for starving third-world countries.
Interest rates too being very high, a lot of time was also been spent in discussion by Congress to arrive at a solution. After much deliberation they decided that, “Interest rates need to come down”. Such decision-making is what separates US Congressmen from us ordinary mortals. This too is a bold innovative plan, and it just might work.
What prompted this global meltdown from the American point of view is “unfair competition”. Unscrupulous rogue American companies (some of them funded by Al Queda) took overpaid jobs away from hardworking Americans and outsourced these services to 3rd world countries like India where employees work for peanuts thus making them wealthier and able to afford 3 square peanut butter sandwiches a day.
Although this made the US shareholders of these companies richer it also put a strain on the US agricultural industry and global oil prices, released additional methane into the atmosphere, increased global warming and subprime mortgages became unviable.
I guess I’ll just bring us all upto date with President Bush’s plan to save the world economy (namely Wall Street’s ass), so we can all get back to our daily humdrum lives or whatever it was we were doing.
The big problem is of course Wall Street which is in New York and conducts shady trafficking in animals like bulls and bears. They also carry on silly businesses, which work something like this:
Suppose a company wants money. It prints up a lot of pages called stocks and then goes to Wall Street looking to sell this paper to one of the traffickers called brokers.
The company asks these brokers,” How would you like to own these lovely bits of paper, look they are printed in so many colours with pretty graphs which show you how many homeless people without jobs or income, we will lend money to, at exhorbitant interest rates to buy houses with attached bathrooms – and this will make us very rich when they cannot pay up and then we can declare bankruptcy and Congress will then give us billions of more dollars of American taxpayers money.
The brokers hem and haw for sometime and then one of them sidles up and buys some stocks this leads to a stampede as all the other traffickers trample over each other for every bit of paper on offer.
Meanwhile the company has sold all its paper and sniggering, leaves hurriedly with a large sum of money, to buy diamonds or jewellery or vacations in the Bahamas.
It eventually dawns on the brokers that now, all they are left with are worthless scraps of paper unless they can get other people to buy it so they approach other brokers and all end up passing paper back and forth for more and more money till a small child says, “The Emperor has no clothes.” or words to that effect.
This makes them realize that they are participating in an enormous hoax, just like the WMD hoax of Iraq, and it could collapse at any moment. This causes them to panic. So today the financial section of the newspaper reads like this:
Markets hit by biggest US failure.
America’s Largest Savings and Loan Co seized. Assets sold…..
Pundits have pointed out that hurricanes Katrina and Andrew and 9/11 disasters are nothing compared to when investors reacted to the discovery that the planet Pluto was really an asteroid and Einstein actually propounded the theory of relative-titty after he married his big-bosomed cousin. E (Einstein ) = M ( marriage to) C (cousin) 2 (twice removed)
The good news is however, that today, one can buy a house in the US complete with indoor plumbing, for just Rs.75,000.00 , of course it’ll cost you an additional Rs.75,000.00 just to fly out there. But then you’d have to move from L.A. to Detroit, Cleveland or heaven forbid Jackson, Mi.
