Why do you think that your taxes should bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?

Question

Is it fair that you all have to pay for Fannie Mae and Freddie Macs mistakes? Dont you think that they should suffer like the rest of us just to teach them a lesson?

Answer 1

Instead of bailing out the banks, why not just bail out the home owners.  Yes, if banks go it will affect the economy, but this argument has been used before and we had to bail the thrifts out in the 1980's.  None of the actual culprits had to pay back a penny, while many homeowners had to wait for years before they could afford another home.  Innocent comptrollers were taken to court, while CEO's and the paid board members were left off the hook entirely.

We cannot let this happen again.  The middle class should not have to pay for the "ignorant innocents"  nor the wealthy bandits who now know they will NEVER be held responsible.  By allowing them to get away with it once again, we are just setting the stage for it to happen again in another 10-20 years.  Thus the rich get richer and have no worries about losing their money, while the middle class gets poorer.

If we can hand over billions to the private banking industry and allow our elected officials and their cronies to become even more wealthy and powerful by buying back the foreclosed homes and then selling at their leisure, why not just cut out the middle men

We should ask our Senators to turn down this bill.

If they wish, they may give all homeowners a $25,000 grant towards paying off their loan.  If they give it in quarterly payments, everyone should be able to pay of their mortgages long enough to get better loans from better loaning entities.  Thus the crisis is avoided and it would be a great stimulus package.  Think about it.  There are only 300,000,000 people in the US.  If you say half of them own a house, that would be 150,000,000 times 25K = $3.75 billion.  And you can just imagine how happy the voters would be.  Just to be fair we could give every register voter $25,000 to pay down their loans, that would only be about 155,000,000 (there were 130,000,000 in 2000, so this is an estimate) and only cost about 3.875 billion.  Both figures could be absolutely figured and budgeted.  And no private industry subsidy would be needed.   I would make it where they could pay off either their mortgages or their credit card debt.  And then put incentives out there for banks to educate people seeking loans and open up a line of communication with their customers to encourage working out payments before foreclosure is an option.  And the bill should have no other attachments, amendments or other pork or malarkey.

I do not believe we should allow private/public banks to make money, but make their customers pay for their losses.

We need to quit giving the low/no interest loans out that we have been giving out for the past months also.  I think we are up to the hundreds of billions in loans already, and it needs to stop until there's some pay back.

You know one of the provisions to collect some of the money back is to add fees to residential loans?  And the other is to just raise the national debt?  And that not going to cause economic disaster?  The poorer middle class will not be able to afford a house loan for the next 10 years if this bill goes through.

Why did the House pass this bill?  I do not get how inflating the economy is going to fight inflation?

What happen in the 1980's was that the government bought up the failing savings and loans .  In 1999 the federal government released a report on how much it costs the tax payers...$128.3 billion.  And how much did it cost the private sector?  $29.1 billion. These are the reported amounts by one FDIC department.  Ones gathered and reported in other reports were much higher.  All of the amounts were 100's times higher than what the government was led to believe when they had to step in.

The bill before the Senate allows the Treasury Department a blank check amount to use to buy up bad deals.  A blank check.

This is not the bill that should be passed.  I do not see where this helps out anyone but the banks, our elected officials and their cronies.

When you take a bad loan, you took a bad loan and the bank gave a bad loan and the whole idea of a contract is those two individuals are suppose to suffer the consequences.  Otherwise you are teaching yet another generation how to put huge debts onto their children while funding horrendously greedy individuals and entities.  Not to mention you are telling people who live up to their agreements that they are idiots.

We really need new leadership in our congress.  I don't care what the party is,  as long as they have more integrity than our present Congressmen and women and enough brains to know that you are not suppose to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Thanks for asking this question.

Wish you would ask, What can we do to stop this fiasco?  I have e-mailed and called my representatives, but it did no good.  What else could we do?

Answer 2

The problem is, in teaching them a lesson, it might severely hurt the economy and cause people who had nothing to do with the loans/mortgages to lose their jobs and suffer.

In a capitalist system, if banks fail, the whole economy will go to a mess.  Companies require loans to grow, people require loans to buy cars and houses, the construction industry requires people to buy houses to keep people employed, same with the auto industry, and so on and so on.

It is unfortunate that some banks made poor decisions, and that people were buying houses they could not afford.  I frankly don't know why people do it, nor why they get in massive amounts of credit card debt, but that is a different topic.

We simply can't afford for major banks to shut down and for depositors to lose their money.  Besides, how much will this cost compared to what one week in Iraq costs?

Answer 3

No, it's not fair.  When they were doing well, did we see any of the profits?  Course not..so why should we have to bail them out for being stupid?

Answer 4

No, they were ran by greedy jackasses that never bothered to even register with the SEC until a week ago, and now all of the sudden they're supposed to be helped out.  These companies knew how toxic these loan programs were and they still sold them.  The only reason we're bailing them out is because they have tons of foreign investors that hold these mortgages that are pissed as h**l because the value has decreased by 30%.  I say let them fail...the repercussions of bailing them out could be grave and could totally change the way a free market works as we know it.

Edit: That's cute Stu you've read there website.  True they take loans and package them into securites to sell to investors, the problem is the mortgage backed securites were filled with toxic loans.  They had no objection to the loans they were packaging because they were making a nice profit til the crisis.

Answer 5

NO! Let them go bust! If we made a bad financial decision no one would bail us out.

The government says they are critical to the economy... hog wash, I bet I would be able to still find someone to cover a loan if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not here.

The US economy is already crashing... they are just dragging everyone down with them... drawing out a long painful death for everyone. If we crash and burn now (let them fail)... only the people who made bad decisions get hurt... we drag it out and everyone gets hurt.