700 Billion bailout plan? What do I think

Wow! first of all that’s a lot of money. Do you really think that’s going to jump start the American economy? Pumping money into banks who lost it all partying in the first place? My stab - well it’s a very dumb plan!

A comment, lending out tax payer’s money to these financial institutions doesn’t mean all of a sudden these banks would start lending?

Few things that can be changed, should be changed - for example the fair value accounting. In a nutshell, due to the fair value accounting system a lot of these big investment banks have gone bankrupt, or have been taken over! According to fair value accounting system, banks are suppose to mark troubled assets on their balance sheets to fair market value.. well that’s an excellent idea - however only in theory, and times like these it has caused major banks to sink. There has been no such data since last year causing these securities to be illiquid. So pretty much banks are mapping this to an index which, at the moment, does not translate to the intrinsic economic value.

Another thought you could be what was suggested last week where the US government acts as a new market, pretty much creates a dummy market to create liquidity where they shall buy these securities on low auctioned prices…

Again this is not a slam dunk!!! We’ll see what happens over the weekend!