Feds start making business loans
As I suggested here last week, the Federal Reserve is now buying "commercial paper" -- short-term IOUs -- from businesses. In other words, it's lending the businesses dough directly, since the usual financiers are hoarding cash for various reasons and won't lend it out.
How long before the government starts making direct mortgage loans and student loans? Not long, I suspect. I just hope they don't put some banksters in the middle of the deals and let them rake fees off the top. Hire bureaucrats and pay them normal people's salaries.
Meanwhile, the financial markets around the world continue to implode. Buy canned tuna and make sure you have a good warm coat, folks. Y2K has arrived, eight years late.
| Posted at 3:47 AM | Permalink |
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Comments (4)
"Y2K has arrived, 8 years late."
I've always wondered why more wasn't made of our response as a society to Y2K. It's easy to forget how ominous it all seemed going in - I heard a panel of very bright-sounding experts say things like, "It's too late to fix the problem. We're screwed." Plus, the way it all came about with computer programs not being designed for 4 digits - it just had the feel of real trouble: Machines turning on Man - the stuff of a million science fiction novels.
So what happened? Government and business got on the problem and it just went away. I saw exactly one story about a gas station that refused a card based on thinking it had expired in 1900 rather than being good through 2000.
It was everything you want in government. A threat is seen out in the future and before it can get here, the problem was solved. Government was more in the background.
With President Bush, it's all been about the feds. Most people I know spend a significant part of their day monitoring, worrying about, or trying to fight the government. At least Y2K was a futuristic problem. With George W. we've slid backwards so we're dealing with authoritarian rule issues that we settled with King Geogre at the dawn of our nation. And now the economy. Who knows? Maybe the computers will start thinking it's 1929 again.
Posted by Bill McDonald | October 8, 2008 7:47 AM
And the news gets worse with the UK Bailout.
Can't get that line from Hunt for Red October out of my head: “This thing will get out of control. This thing will get out of control, and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”
Posted by Chris Coyle | October 8, 2008 8:54 AM
Geogre: an excellent Freudian typo. Thanks, Bill!
Posted by Allan L. | October 8, 2008 9:33 AM
I need an easy christmas loan.A loan of #200,000 with interest rate of 3%
Posted by kelly ose | October 27, 2008 2:46 AM