$85 Billion For AIG And Wall St. Is Still Unhappy

Last night you, myself and three hundred million Americans helped pay to take over the insurance giant AIG. We've loaned this company $85 billion dollars in exchange for a 79.9% share and the choice of a new CEO. So how did Wall Street respond this morning? The market opened more than two hundred points down. Some thank you, right?

From The NY Times:

The Dow Jones industrials plummeted more than 200 points in the first minutes of trading, and the broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index lost about 2 percent. The Dow was down 190 points at 9:40 a.m.

Stocks fought their way to a positive finish on Tuesday, but spent much of the day in negative territory. On Monday, the American stock market suffered its worst single session since the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Shares of A.I.G. shed another 33 percent even after the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department decided last night to prop up the ailing insurer with an $85 billion loan. Federal officials appeared to take the extraordinary measure after fears arose that a collapse at A.I.G. could set off catastrophe consequences in the global financial system.

Now I hear that there are a lot of smart people on the Federal Reserve Board, but if they think that this loan was going to solve our financial crisis or even stem it, then it is time for a few people to go back to Econ 101. No amount of federal giveaway to the titans of business will help us. According to that last paragraph, we've already lost 33 percent of that investment loan and nobody knows where it'll stop.

This must be one of George Bush and John McCain's fundamentals. When their friends screw up with a highly deregulated market, simply bail them out with the taxpayer's money. Does that sound fair to you? Where was your $85 billion when the choice came down to food on the table or the children's health care? Where were those billions when you lost your job overseas because of NAFTA and its subsequent trade deals? Where was that money when the American people needed it?

George Bush, John McCain and the people they keep in the Federal Reserve care about the market and nothing else. Sure, we need to keep business going, but business doesn't go without the people that make it run. CEOs may make decisions, but workers are what allow them to be there in the first place. Deregulation and the resulting corruption is what put us here, and only a reversal of that is going to get us out, no matter how many borrowed billions we throw away in this fire.