Warren Buffett to USA: Thanks a lot, suckers!

[Rage for Order]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/opinion/17buffett.html?ref=opinion&loc=interstitialskip

DEAR Uncle Sam,

My mother told me to send thank-you notes promptly. I’ve been remiss.

Let me remind you why I’m writing. Just over two years ago, in September 2008, our country faced an economic meltdown. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the pillars that supported our mortgage system, had been forced into conservatorship. Several of our largest commercial banks were teetering. One of Wall Street’s giant investment banks had gone bankrupt, and the remaining three were poised to follow. A.I.G., the world’s most famous insurer, was at death’s door.

Many of our largest industrial companies, dependent on commercial paper financing that had disappeared, were weeks away from exhausting their cash resources. Indeed, all of corporate America’s dominoes were lined up, ready to topple at lightning speed. My own company, Berkshire Hathaway, might have been the last to fall, but that distinction provided little solace.

Well, Uncle Sam, you delivered. People will second-guess your specific decisions; you can always count on that. But just as there is a fog of war, there is a fog of panic — and, overall, your actions were remarkably effective.

I don’t know precisely how you orchestrated these. But I did have a pretty good seat as events unfolded, and I would like to commend a few of your troops. In the darkest of days, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair grasped the gravity of the situation and acted with courage and dispatch. And though I never voted for George W. Bush, I give him great credit for leading, even as Congress postured and squabbled.


More at the link, if you can stomach it. If ever there was any doubt, we've most certainly been had.

:puke:

[KansasVoter]

1. When I read it I thought the same thing, of course his ass is happy. He is still rich!

[Poll_Blind]

2. What a strange communication. Oh, BTW, today WH announced Obama was going to give him Medal of...

...Freedom. Along with George HW Bush. No joke.

PB

[Rage for Order]

3. I hadn't seen that

Wow. I don't know what to say. I'm completely speechless.

[Poll_Blind]

4. It's not as big a deal to me as it is to some. Sadly, it's kind of not entirely surprising in a...

...weird way. Still, it's a shame we don't have a Percocet floating around the house. (The ones they give you for pulled teeth)

PB

[Greyhound]

5. Oops.

More exposure, more relevant, less homogeneous.
:kick: & R

[Rage for Order]

6. Think all of his billionaire buddies are telling him...

"Shhhh! Be quiet Warren! They're not supposed to know how well we made out on our scam!"?

[Unvanguard]

7. He's absolutely right, like it or not. n/t

[Rage for Order]

8. No doubt we bailed his ass out

But what about the tens of millions of unemployed, foreclosed-upon Americans who weren't bailed out? Do you think they'll be writing an editorial in the NYT any time soon telling everyone how thankful they that the government saved them from an economic catastrophe? Yeah, I don't think so either.

[TreasonousBastard]

16. So, those millions would be better off if the entire economy collapsed...

and everyone else was out of work, too?

(Why do I smell the sharp scent of sour grapes around here?)

[RadiationTherapy]

18. Sour grapes!? over the current distribution of wealth in america?

Sour grapes. An aesop fable. For children. That's how you categorize the gap between the wealthy and impoverished? That's a blind analogy right there. Silly, really.

[Unvanguard]

21. That's not the right way to think about it.

Your comparison, implicitly, is to the economy without the recession. But the right comparison to see Warren Buffett's point is to the economy with the recession but without government intervention. And that would be a catastrophe of an order of magnitude greater than the present one.

[TheWatcher]

22. Many are still living under the delusion that any of this was done for our benefit

or the Greater Good.

What this did do was bail out the criminals that CAUSED the crisis, and kicked the can of consequences a little further down the road, and really did nothing to address any of the underlying causes or issues that created the crisis to begin with.

it's like putting a Band-Aid on Cancer.

It might cover up the tumor, but it's still going to kill you.

Delaying the Inevitable is not a solution.

But then again, I'm sure most of the hapless, go-along public will go along with more of their "solutions" when another "crisis" comes along.

"Thank God It Passed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111"

:crazy:

[Frances]

9. I cannot believe so many DUers are ignorant of history

If there had not been a bailout, there would have been a great depression, not a very severe recession. Rent The Grapes of Wrath if you don't know the difference.

The problems that created the need for a bailout came about because of the Republican insistence on deregulation as well as the tax cuts for the wealthy without paying for them.

Warren Buffet argued against the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy loudly and clearly when they were proposed and continues to do so today.

[Rage for Order]

11. Therein lies the rub

It's impossible to say what would have happened, so all we're left with is conjecture. We already have tens of millions out of work, millions who are hungry, and millions who have lost their homes. Let the companies fail, and instead of sending the trillions of dollars to Wall Street, mail the money to individual tax payers. We would have spent it, thereby stimulating the economy and creating (or sustaining) jobs. Let the rich form their circular firing squad and figure out how they can do business in a way that doesn't bankrupt everyone next time.

[dkf]

12. No. I think it is possible to say what would have happened.

The financial system would have collapsed taking the FDIC with it. Then your bank accounts.

I guess if we wanted everyone to be equally destitute this would have been a great opportunity.

[girl gone mad]

14. The FDIC would have insured depositors, as promised.

That was never an actual concern.

[dkf]

20. If 4 banks representing 55% of $4.4 trillion in deposits failed so you think the

FDIC could handle that?

[girl gone mad]

23. We backstopped the banking industry to the tune of $24 trillion+.

So, yes, $4.4 trillion would clearly not have been a problem.

[girl gone mad]

13. Only if you believe that the sole alternative was to do nothing.

In fact, we could have had a dramatically stronger economy, had our elected and appointed officials chosen to stimulate more wisely, allow the fraudsters to fail and finally break the stranglehold of big finance.

I would recommend you peruse some threads from the economy forum, contemporaneous with the early crisis and bailouts. Virtually every last criticism of these policies has been vindicated, and most of our fears have now come to pass. The banks did not increase lending or shore up their balance sheets. Instead, they used the money to pay themselves larger bonuses and to speculate, fueling more bubbles around the globe. The Too Big to Fail banks are in as precarious a position as they were at the start. What was a private solvency crisis is now a much more dangerous sovereign debt crisis. The financial terrorists are demanding austerity in order to preserve their wealth. The far right is taking over our government. There is no hope of bringing down unemployment in the near future. The foreclosure crisis is much worse now. The Fed is failing spectacularly. Fraud has been institutionalized and rewarded, work punished. We are in real trouble. Liberals are not even in this fight any more, we've been shut out. The showdown will be between neo-liberal corporate communism/fascism and Austrian laissez faire anarcho-libertarianism. Pick your poison.

[Hannah Bell]

15. +100

[Greyhound]

17. I cannot believe so many DUers are ignorant of what actually happened.

You were blackmailed, plain & simple. They threatened you with fantastic pictures of a dystopian illusion and you bought it.

As girl gone mad pointed out above, there was no need to bankrupt the national treasury and jeopardize our economic standing except to preserve the fortunes of the parasites that caused this. Deposits were insured and there were hundreds, if not thousands of small banks capable of carrying on the function of currency creation and control. The only thing the bailout did was to dump the parasites losses onto your children and grandchildren.

[SkyDaddy7]

19. You are 1000% correct! He also exposed...

the truth that rich people like him pay less income tax than his cleaning lady! I think many here feel that if someone has money they are evil simply because they have money...He is also trying to convince other rich people to give away most of their wealth when they die. I like the guy. There are far worse people out there folks could direct their anger at!

The bailouts & the stimulus are why most people do not understand just how freaking bad things were! Had those bailouts not happened I seriously doubt most can even imagine how bad it would have been and how long it would have remained bad...What we are going through now is nothing compared to what it could have been! Thanks to Obama the tax payer is due to get all that money back...Even turn a profit! Plus, who knows how many jobs he saved bailing out GM!

[MrScorpio]

10. I'm just wondering how badly things would be now had the entire economy collapsed

Sure, it would have taken down the billionaires too...

They'd just be standing on the soup lines, in the rubble with the rest of us.

[Fire Walk With Me]

24. See:

http://www.sonyclassics.com/insidejob/