Though I have been busy the last week or so eating MRE’s and listening to shortwave radio in my FFB (Financial Fallout Bunker), I decided to take a short break from preparing for financial doom this morning and read some headlines. I noted with interest that sales of personal safes are running particularly strong.
I also noted the Treasury Department is spinning its bailout strategy in a particularly amusing way:
Treasury to Invest in `Healthy’ Banks, Kashkari Says (Update3)
By Rebecca Christie and Robert Schmidt
Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) — Neel Kashkari, the U.S. Treasury official overseeing the $700 billion rescue of the financial system, said government equity injections will be aimed at “healthy” firms.
“We are designing a standardized program to purchase equity in a broad array of financial institutions,” Kashkari, who heads the department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, said in a speech in Washington. “The equity purchase program will be voluntary and designed with attractive terms to encourage participation from healthy institutions.”
Well sure! We’re nationalizing banks – but only healthy ones! Because we don’t want them to fail, those healthy banks. Financial retards such as myself were completely unaware that it was the healthy banks that were in need of cash infusions.
Being locked up in my FFB for so long has probably dulled my mind, for here I was thinking that it was unhealthy financial institutions that the government was worried about, and needed to prevent from failure. But no! We are only helping the healthy banks.
I know that this must make sense at some level, I must just be too stupid to understand it. Because if it meant what I think it meant, then that would mean either the government is stupid or the government is lying.
2 Comments
October 14, 2008 at 1:09 am
Heh. My local bank is offering 5.25% on checking accounts with less than 20k. I wonder if that has anything to do with a balance sheet problem. Maybe the bank is just being generous to its customers, who already get FREE CHECKING! on top of the 5.25% interest.
Wow, the bank lets me give it my money for free to lend to other people. How generous of it. I wish we could all be so charitable as to offer free services.
The advertisement for this “service” depicts a guy who has just stuck his finger in an electrical piggy bank. He looks like he’s just been sitting in an electric chair. How apt.
October 15, 2008 at 5:34 pm
“either the government is stupid or the government is lying.”
They’re lying!…. and they’re stupid.
Thanks for the laugh you gave me with this post. I know what’s happening is not funny, but if I don’t laugh at stuff like this, I become infuriated. Maybe that’s what we need to be.
Ever see the bumper sticker… “Sure you can trust the government… just ask the Indians!”