When Paulson got on his knees before Nancy Pelosi, to literally beg for her help in getting Congress to pass the bailout? Ever wondered what Paulson and Bernanke told Bush for him to (stupidly) announce on television, "This sucker's going down"? I know I sure have. Well, one of the Congressmen involved in the negotiations finally spilled the beans:
"Over a period of an hour or two, there was a "tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the United States, to the tune of $550 billion dollars. ... The Treasury opened its window to help. They pumped a hundred and five billion dollars into the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts, and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn't be further panic and there. And that's what actually happened. If they had not done that their estimation was that by two o'clock that afternoon, five-and-a-half trillion dollars would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed."
"It would have been the end of our political system and our economic systems as we know it."
Well, guess it has to happen sooner or later.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I just edited meeting minutes for an emergency committee that my boss is sitting on. It's a group of service providers like 2nd harvest food distribution, homeless shelters and other organizations that are experiencing dramatic increases in demand for their services (mortgage help was another one). What was especially scary to me was that the reason they are meeting is not so much to take care of what they have now but what to do in the near future when they fear they will be truly overwhelmed with need.
ReplyDelete