Loans Resources

While most media attention is focused this week on the Senate debate on the economic stimulus package, the Obama administration is preparing to roll out a new plan to bail out the banks, involving a trillion dollars or more in public assets.
Under the plan, which Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is expected to announce within the next two weeks, the government will buy up virtually worthless mortgage-backed securities and other "toxic" assets held by the banks and provide guarantees against future losses for much of their remaining assets. It will also continue to inject cash directly into the banks.
Indeed, one of the purposes of the stimulus package is to provide political cover, in the form of aid to "Main Street," for the offloading of Wall Street’s losses onto the American people. Meanwhile, the stimulus plan, which does nothing to halt the destruction of jobs or the wave of home foreclosures, but includes lucrative tax write-offs for business and funnels government projects to private companies, is being weakened further at the behest of Wall Street and congressional Republicans. It is now reported that Obama has dropped a provision that would allow bankruptcy judges to lower the principal and ease mortgage terms for distressed homeowners.
The administration is mounting a public relations campaignstarting with Obama’s public wrist-slap of Wall Street executives for continuing to reward themselves with billions in bonusesto give the impression that it is cracking the whip on executive compensation. But as the Washington Post reports, "[T]he administration is likely to refrain from imposing tough restrictions on executive compensation at most firms receiving government aid" because "harsh limits could discourage some firms from asking for aid."
The new bank bailout, like every measure that has been devised in response to the financial meltdown, will be tailored entirely to the interests of the financial aristocracy. Under the terms of the plan, as outlined in various press reports, the bad assets accumulated through speculation and fraud will be transferred to a "bad bank" owned by the government. The government will buy these assets not at their actual market value, which is pennies on the dollar, but, according to the Financial Times, on the basis of a "valuation model," guaranteeing premium prices for bank executives and big shareholders.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/feb2009/pers-f03.shtml

Thoughts, opinions?