Dear Congress,
All I want to do this week is fill up my car with gas, go to work, make enough money to pay my bills and buy groceries and maybe save a little for my children's college. To do this my employer needs credit, especially from our customers. That will be a little hard if the credit markets freeze. Companies require credit to conduct their business, which is most of them. A lot of non-banking companies out there, even with good credit, may soon not need the money they need to conduct business as the banks either don't have the money to spare or they are too scared to lend. The thought of 700 billion dollars churns my stomach, but I think in the long run the economic fallout from bank and business failure will cost more than $700B.
At this point I don't really care who is responsible for this mess, I just have this horrible feeling that we're making a bigger mess by not fixing it now. I know its an election year and you have to posture against Wall Street and make sure Main Street is taken care of, but I worry you're really taking care of MainStreet in a bad way. Sooner or later the rest of the world is going to write us off as a bad debt and then where will we be? I understand you don't want to vote for it, because it's politically unpopular, despite being the smart thing to do. Some analysts think that we may even make a profit from this (of course that assumes that less than 50% of the bad mortgages fail), as we have in the past.
Just because the unwashed ignorant masses, which is pretty much most of us, think they'll be sticking it to Wall Street fat cats, doesn't make it so. Yes, some of those businesses made some bad decisions and they deserve to fail. But do we want to see them fail at our expense? Without the bailout, there might not be jobs for any of us to work as credit dries up. Look I don't like the bailout/investment of those who got us into the mess, which includes you for taking away the regulations that could have prevented this mess, but I like sleeping on the street even less. Just take your pound of flesh and move on already. Nationalize the banks if you have to. Take equity in the banks. Whatever. Just stop farking around and get to work.
I don't know if this plan is how to fix our markets or is just the delaying the inevitable. I'm not an expert on financial markets or monetary policy and this whole rush to pass the bill feels like the runup to Iraq all over again. But I think if we just stick by our laissez-faire guns, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. We've made our bed with the housing bubble and all the leveraging. Now we need to sleep in it. Stop digging in on principals before more people lose their jobs or houses. Don't make this an an ideological issue; put the good of the country first. And then, tomorrow, or next week, work on our 10 trillion dollar debt before the dollar is worth no more than monopoly money.
I remember reading in an FDR bio that in the last weeks of the Hoover administration the economy essentially stopped as banks stopped lending money as they waited to see what FDR would do. This had the immediate effect of increasing unemployment as business stopped as they became unable to pay payrolls, hire new employees and buy supplies. Farmers were unable to afford seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides for the next year. I really don't want to see the GreatDepression renamed World Depression I.
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