Carly’s Right

Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, says the banks we just bailed out with our $350 billion largess should be lending to the Detroit Big 3. I agree. If the purpose for our investment in the banks was to get them lending, why shouldn’t they be first at the plate to lend that bridge loan to America’s auto industry? Shouldn’t this be the first big test of that wisdom?

AIG Still At It!!

Check the Wall St. Journal, Dec. 10, 2008. Front page lead story on AIG says “But thee are no actual securities back ing the speculative positions that the insurer is losing money on.  Instead, these bets were made on the direction of pools of mortgage assets and corporate debt, and AIG now finds itself in a position of having to raise funds to pay off its partners.” PF: One may assume that the partners are sophisticated investors who should’ve known better.

Farther down the page: “The $10 billion in other IOUs stems from market wagers that weren’t contracts to protect physical securities held by banks or other investors against default. Rather, they ar from AIG’s exposures to speculative investments unrelated to insurance, which were essentially bets…” 

Must reading!

Our Guess is as Good, Apparently, As Theirs

Hi and welcome to Planet Finance, where we, the millions of people left out of the trillion dollar bailout, can offer up brilliant ways of speeding the economic recovery along. I hope this takes off. Can you imagine having Joe Six-Pack and George Soros debating how to rescue the housing market?