<p>I for one will be beyond fed-up if taxes go up due to these bailouts. I never flipped a house, never bought a house and then made huge money on it, never took out a mortgage I couldn’t afford, never opted in to the rah-rah have to buy a big place to keep up with Jones’ phenomena, and honestly I am tired of bailing out people and corporate entities whose greed and short sightedness and mistakes mean they have lost money in all this. I find it absurd that in the whole Bear/Fannie/Freddie mess there is so little accountability placed at the feet of the people making 20,000,000/year to ‘run’ these places. </p>
<p>I do not consider any of these people to be victims of something bigger than themselves-- I think the collective sense of entitlement has undermined the well being of the US economy-- </p>
<p>I appreciate the trickle down destabilizing elements of all this, but maybe we need a true recession or (((depression))) to reset our collective sense of the difference between Want and Need which has been so distorted. If people cannot afford it and have to cut their cable and no longer are bombarded with the commercial and over the top lifestyles which they then ‘aspire’ to, maybe this will not be such a bad thing.</p>
<p>I understand what you are saying, but the collapse of Freddie and Fannie will have a more devastating impact on the economy. The sad part is that this country is broke, and we would have to borrow more to bail them out. Our fiscal policies are so out of whack with the fundamentals of the economy, and we will pay dearly down the line if we don’t curtail federal spending. </p>
<p>The stock prices of freddie and Fannie have fallen from a high of $70 to a low of $4 and it will fall further. I hate a lot of government oversight of private companies, but I think Freddie and Fannie are two companies that i would agree with a little more oversight given their importance to the whole housing industry. James Johnson (ex vice president vetter for Obama) is part of the problem, their accounting was shady under his leadership, they had to restate their balance sheet for a lot of years. They formed their own lobbying group to lobby congress for sweetheart deals, they know that the government wont let them fail so they did whatever they want without any fear. The executives were paid hundreds of millions of dollars for doing lousy jobs.</p>
<p>As in all cases, the tax payer is stuck with the bill. I feel sorry for all tax payers.</p>
<p>This morning’s market feels like a crisis of confidence in the banking system. I wish you could see me real-time streaming charts. It is slow-motion panic.</p>
<p>Freddie and Fannie can not be allowed to fail as it would take the rest of the banking system with it. If you have a money market account, look carefully at what it owns. It probably has agreements with lots of other banks and has a variety of securities. If those counterparties fail, your money market will have losses.</p>