For those of you who KNOW me, I am no financial wizard. I, like many of you, spend a good amount of my hard-earned money. However, I’ve never spent more than I had – which the US government does with some regularity.
So, with yesterday’s bailout backout, I was confused as to what and why. Part of it stems from the fact that I know things are VERY partisan right now – and have been for the last 8 years. Bush is little more than a bully. Even a guy I met the other day, an attorney here in New York, mentioned that a buddy of his in DC hates being in DC anymore because the two sides won’t even drink or dine together. Civility had always been our bedrock, and away it has gone.
I did not understand this morning when I watched CNN and saw them crawling the votes from the bailout package. It showed that more republicans voted ‘No’ on the package than did Democrats. All of this made the comments of the republicans absurd in saying that they blamed the democrats. The votes don’t lie. And while I did not hear the comments that Speaker Pelosi made in their entirety, I cannot imagine that were incendiary enough to make 66% of republicans in a VERY partisan town vote FOR something she wanted. It is simply illogical.
I will bring all of this back to me. Two to four years ago, I was the Director of Marketing for a major east coast mortgage brokerage house. In 2005, they wrote just under $1 Billion in loans from Boston down to Florida – New York, New Jersey, Connecticut on down. Since they’re not a bank, only a broker, it was the bank who had approved those loans. While the company, generally unbeknownst to me, was fairly shady in its practices, to a degree, they were only doing what the banks were allowing them to do. My war stories from that period were and are legendary…but for a later time. My point here is that the banks and institutions that this broker was doing business with were allowing these deals.
Therefore, we cannot simply ‘blank check’ these financial institutions. I am a pretty hands-off guy. However, where it comes to $2300 per man, woman and child when a lot of these men, women and children were raked over the coals to begin with by these institutions, we must have all the oversight needed to ensure that we do not find ourselves in a similar or worse mess in a few weeks, months or years.