But I have been especially intrigued of late with all the bellyaching we are hearing from retailers and credit card companies, etc. as our economy takes a nosedive. For instance, I saw a news clip with a handful of shoppers interviewed and one lady was talking about cutting back this holiday season because the money just wasn't there. Sounds reasonable and responsible to me. Of course Bank of America and their ilk would disagree (as would GAP and Macy's). They want us up to our eyeballs in bills that we can barely pay, that is their bread and butter.
Which leads me to Mr. Paulson's recent "redefining" of the big bailout package to the financial industry. Ole Hank is now saying some of that chunk of change is going to the credit card companies so they can ease up and give us poor schmucks more rope to hang ourselves. (Does this mean me telling BP to stuff their card where the sun doesn't shine after they reduced my credit limit, even though I am not carrying a balance, was wasted effort? That soon they would have been sending me a letter saying "Oops! Our bad, here have even more money!" And yes, BP is now dead to me. So I will be purchasing my sweet crude elsewhere thank you!)
First, I don't cotton to the Treasury Secretary monkeying around with this money. What's to stop him from deciding next week that he thinks he needs to shore up the craps tables at Caesar's Palace? It isn't like we locked down any hard and fast rules in regards to this money, like our friends across the pond did.
Second, I have no freakin' sympathy for the credit card companies (not that I have any for Wall Street either for that matter). They are only reaping what they have sown (to continue my biblical metaphor).
Thirdly, we Americans have stuffed ourselves with useless junk (myself included) in the same way we have with food (ditto) and now it is time to pay the piper. So what if we have to scale back and not buy the kiddies their 10 millionth video game where women wear nothing and people get their heads blown off graphically. So what if we have to make our own lattes at home or buy cotton instead of cashmere. It isn't the end of the world. As much as I LOVE Christmas and shopping and the whole consumer kit and kaboodle, I know when to say uncle. And the time is now.
3 comments:
i don't get the whole bail out in gereral, of course i'm not an economist. if i over extend myself i'm still expected to pay. i do not understand bailing out credit card companies or wall street or auto makers. it's supply and demand. if there's no demand for what you're making/selling/etc. then either get out or make something else. it's survival of the fittest and just because companies are big doesn't mean they shouldn't have to live by the same basic rules we do. or am i being too simplistic and naive in thinking this?
I'm feeling your pain! Thanks to the bad real estate market and John's stroke, we're pretty much living on credit right now. Only a year or two ago, we had no credit card debt whatsoever. So you just never know...
So we are definitely cutting back as much as possible. But what do you do when your family insists on buying you Christmas presents? John and I are still better off than they are, but they won't cut back? I don't get it. It's as if the point is to put each other in more debt.
As far as the automakers go, it's a jungle out there! Survival of the fittest. These companies really should have failed long ago, but now that it's happening all at once, the taxpayer will be forced to bail them out. What's to prevent it from happening again? What do we do when the next "critical industry" comes a'cryin?
ahh . . my faithful commentators, where would i be without you.
i agree that we should let them sink or swim, although the wall street money types seem to think that there would be more bad repercussions if we went that route.
if we are going to bail them out, for whatever reason, we need some hard and fast guarantees, something we don't have.
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