rational geekery

I'm pretty sure that the bail-outs of AIG*, Freddie Mac, and Frannie Mae were indeed necessary to protect the US financial system (whether a system so fundamentally vacuous deserved saving, is another matter), but you can bet that an American, who played by the rules and borrowed modestly, is pretty hacked off by the massive transfer of debt from private hands to the tax-payer. In effect socialising debt (do you know it's the biggest transfer or debt in history?).

As WashPo reports ::

And they say they don't like it. They didn't break it, but now they've bought it. Political leaders and financial titans say the bailout is necessary to save the economy, but on the ground, in such places as Manassas Park, people think that the bailout will reward the wrong people. There's a sense that too many folks bought houses they couldn't really afford, banks urged them on, common sense went on vacation, and now the grown-ups have to clean up the mess.

The question is where do we go from here? The Bush administration has massively increased the country's already enormous national debt in its last few weeks in office. The man who was framed as the first CEO President (a joke when you look at his actual business acumen), will hand over one of the worst economic situations in history. Even if Obama is elected, what chance does he have of presiding over a stable and flourishing economy? He's on a hiding to nothing.

*AIG secures many investors who hedged their stocks, and its collapse would have ricocheted through the economy