The Flip It Perspective

Cody Willard had a good piece on Fox:

"What exactly is the job of the hundreds of thousands of people employed at the investment banks here in the US? Their job is to help the rest of us manage the nuances and issues that are inherent in any economy. Their job is to help people make sure they never get brazenly levered up when times are great and that they never have to desperately scramble to sell off any assets of any value whatsoever when times are bad.

I wish it were only ironic that these investment banks were brazenly levered up when times were great and now are desperately scrambling to sell off any assets of any value whatsoever when times are bad. Instead, after pocketing hundreds of billions in profits for their shareholders and employees, they now use their Illuminati connections at the Fed and Capitol Hill to sneak your money into their pockets to assist their desperate scrambling to stay alive now that times are bad and they neglected to save for the rainy day.

Let the investment banks and anybody else who took bad risks at the top burn. Let ‘em lose their shirt like they certainly deserve too.

I mean, the very idea that saving these banks with tax dollars, thereby putting all their private losses during the bad times onto the taxpayer even though the taxpayer didn’t get to partake in the private gains during the good times is somehow good for the taxpayer IS INSULTING. Having your money stolen and given to irresponsible idiot bankers who were on the other side of your smart trades ain’t good for you or for the market place or for the economy.

It’s pretty simple, really. Everybody keeps trying to convince me that if Bear and Lehman and anyone else actually go bankrupt that the bad times will really get bad. What kind of sense does that make? Saving the idiots on the wrong side of the trade only serves to make the bad times last longer and get worse, no? Flip it!!!

Finally, anybody else notice the striking parallels of business idiocy at the investment banks and at the car companies? Ford bought SUV companies for billions when gas was cheap and SUVs were hot. Now it sells Land Rover and Jaguar for 1/3 of what it paid for it. GM’s all “proud” to announce that they’re basically getting out of the SUV business and focusing on smaller cars…yup, right now AFTER oil’s up 1200% in the last few years while GM was focusing on SUVs.

Of course, we subsidize those idiot car sellers in this country with billions of your tax dollars and subsidies and breaks and other loop hole tricks.

Airline industry? Always consolidating in the bad times using billions of your tax dollars and then going nuts overexpanding in the good times.

I’d just note that companies like Intel and Apple have done a little bit better job handling their respective cycles…Intel jacked up investment on R&D in 2002 and 2003 when the tech-economy was in depression. Didn’t use billions of your tax dollars to do it, either. (And they’re not asking for billions in new subsidies or breaks right now either.)

The upshot? If you think any of these corporations are actually more deserving of your take home pay than you are…if you really think that it’s better for the economy and for you and your children in the long run that Bear’s shareholders and lenders get $30 billion of your money for no other reason than they had gambled too much and then got dealt a bad hand…if you really think Ford and GM are efficiently using your tax dollars to create better, more reliable, safer and cleaner cars than otherwise would hit the market place over the next couple decades…if you really think that Lehman and the other investment banks endless chicanery is better for the capital markets than to let the capital markets eat the losing gamblers and liars, thereby allowing new, smarter, more efficient and effective entrepreneurs create new investment banks…

Well, if you really believe all that, then I encourage you to fight to keep the status quo. Don’t just condone these actions. Vote Republican and/or Democrat so that you can actually participate in these scams. Start a fund of funds to lever up in SUVs and CDOs to get that extra 30 bps in return steady every month…oh wait, that scam’s over already. Write your representatives telling them to create more subsidies and tax credits and rate cuts and exchange windows for any investment bank that’s suffering in these hard times. Because, really, those Bear Stearns shareholders and lenders are so much more deserving of your money than you are."
http://cody.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2008/06/04/flip-it-saving-the-ibanks-makes-the-bad-times-worse-and-last-longer/