Letters to the Editor
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Recycling...
I hated the Fed Bailout of Bear Stearns. The deal only happened because the fed bought assets that were supposed to be $30B which no one else had any interest in buying... This cash went directly to JPMorgan and ultimately it amounts to a $30B bribe to take on the company no one wanted to touch.
At the hearing Dodd concluded "JPMorgan isn't really putting any money in" to the deal. None of the panelists had a response before Bernanke chimed in that JP is taking on $1B of risk and that the fed could theoretically turn a profit on the deal.
Frankly, I'm outraged at how it all played out, and especially the sweetened deal for Bear shareholders. But we'd just given JP a $30B cash advance so what's another billion dollars of taxpayer money? Newsflash BS shareholders and employees - your company was worthless except for an infusion of $30B worth of taxpayers cash - you bastards should have got nothing and just shut up - that's how the capitalism game you so enthusiastically embrace is supposed to work, remember?
Still, in the fed's defense we're talking about $516 TRILLION of notional derivatives exposures worldwide here a figure 1,000 times the estimates of subprime related losses - $500B. Something definitely needed to be done about Bear.