I think Bernanke is doing better than Greenspan ever did. I'm surprised that anyone even listens anymore to anything that crazy old fool has to say. He is as responsible for this mess as the Bush administration and the Republican congress. Bernanke has done about as well as anyone could with the pile of steaming turds he inherited.

Kudos to " stinking names" finally an intelligent comment on the web. The crisis is about trust & liquidity. We got here because the grand hosts of this financial buffet never realized that wood alcohol in the punch bowl will kill you!!!!! Now everyone is poisoned & we really don't know who if any will survive . This will take a strategic & huge infusion of government money & resources. Where to get it? Get out of Iraq asap ,
cut the military budget in half , nationalize the health care , public works programs for infrastructure,education & alternate energy

Marty,

My opinion is that Bernanke inherited a very unstable economy brought about by years of neglect by Greenspan. The Fed and Treasury are borrowing from China and other foreign creditors to stave off the inevitable really bad times facing this country. I believe that they are trying to ratchet down rather than allowing a "free market" reaction to the policies fostered by Democrats and Republicans alike since 1981.

When Hugo Chavez nationalized the oil industry, the U.S. was the first and loudest to decry that action. Now we the taxpayers and citizens of this country are being told to accept our government's same action as the only reasonable approach. Our currency weakens as our debt increases and GDP decreases. The other shoe is going to drop. The only questions are: i) when; and ii) how much worse will it be as a result of the interventionist ineptitude of the leaders upon whom we depend.

Since the taxpayers have gotten in the business of buying private companies- I think we should have bought Exxon-Mobil- not AIG.

Just another mess made by de-regulation or no regulation. And who pays for it?? The little guy. The CEO's will still have their mansions , sport car collections, and vacations all over the world. If I were to guess, Id bet they'll lower the interest rate again dropping our dollar again vs other currency's. My reasoning is they wouldn't dare raise taxes, or cut programs, before the election .

The Fed make a huge mistake. They should have let the situation run its course and correct itself. The US does not have enough assets to end the run that is going on worldwide! They just threw away 85 billion for nothing.

Where does Alan Greenspan invest his money? Or for that matter, where does his wife, Andrea Mitchell, invest her money?

The Fed did absolutely the right thing by not lowering rates because the problem in the financial system is not the rates (in fact LIBOR has completely detached from the Fed's targeted rates), it's the complete lack of liquidity in the markets. The only effective way for the Fed to tackle this issue is to increase its use of the special lending facilities that pump money into the markets on a short-term basis. Interest rates are inconsequential so long as banks refuse to lend any money to each other. Indeed look at mortgage rates, they're higher than they were 6 months ago despite a huge drop in the Fed Funds rate.

-cj

I'm not for this bailout. This will not solve the entire problem and we will be back in the same position 6 months from now. Already a line is forming outside congress with more and more corporations with their hands out. Whats next?

When is the last time uncle sam bailed out a local Ma and Pa business on Main St?

Why Wall St but not the little guy? Wall St. should abide by the same rules as the rest of us do.

NO bailout.

I will not be voting for ANYONE who supports the bill. Sorry but did anyone notice how in the past week an army of banking lobbyists have decended on Washington to insure that executives are protected.. This bill will not help anyone hurting right now.

This mess took a decade to build and simply throwing cash at it (at the expense of our children) is not a sound answer.  It is time that we individually determine what measures we need to take retract our spending and get a better handle on our I2E ratio.

This should be a painful lesson to the ideals of unregulated captialism coupled with corporate greed.  You can't let people run amock, but you also can't put everyone on a level playing field.  There will always the "have's" and "have nots" and while it is unfortunate for some, forcing money to try to "quick fix" a larger issue is paramount to trying to apply bandaids to a gaping head wound...even if it does seem to squelch the bleeding, it's not solving the problem.

How does a child realize that fire is hot?  By telling them it's hot and hoping they understand the concept of hot?  No, sometimes they need to find out for themselves in a trial-and-error.  We've had our trial/error and simply writing a check to those that mismanaged our funds and our lives is simply clearing the slate so they can do it again.

In the first place, who has been in control of the Congress for the past two years?  Before then, consumer confidence was high, gasoline sold for around $2.19 per gallon, the unemployment rate was 4.5%, the Dow hit a record high of 14,000, Americans were buying new cars, taking cruises, vacations overseas, living large; but America wanted CHANGE and in 2006, the Democratic Congress came in and in the past year---consumer confidence has plunged, gasoline is over $3.50 per gallon, unemployment is up to 5.5%, prices on homes have dropped significantly, 1% of homes are in foreclosure, the Dow has gone crazy.  We got change didn't we, but how much more change can we stand? 

Nowadays the market is no different than a very sick junkie that expects another rate-cut fix every now and then just to keep itself from slipping into a coma.  This huge mess needs to be sorted out by market participants and losses have to be borne by those who profited from it in the past few years.  Cutting rates is only serve to prolong the evitable, which will be more severe the longer it gets put off.  Most of us cannot afford to borrow anymore evenif the rate is brought down to zero, and bank cannot afford to lend either if most people just switch to keeping their money in checking account if the rate is zero.  In the mean time, are we going to be staring at another hike in oil prices?  

Just let it fall, and let it work itself out. It is the Feds and Wall Street that got us here. 

Remember?  And who even gets in office will just go down the drain with it. There is No Quick Fix! So let it fall and then work itself out.  That is what will happen any way! 

At this point the only thing that will help is an overall change of thinking and procedure. The arrogant wall street fools responsible for raping equity from the middle class and the energy speculators that pillaged disposable income from everyone, need to be arrested and tried. If they were dealt with harshly but with due process, it would deterr others from such greed at least for a while.

Then we need to use the tax structure to re-balance earnings and productivity.

 For the last 30 years, productivity has grown at around 20% per decade while middle class inflation adjusted wages fell to a point where they were just keeping up with inflation.

Before the Regan era, productivity and wages were paralell lines that grew in relation to each other. Now wages are horizontal (no growth over inflation) except for the executive wages which have actually outpaced productivity increases. This has caused the middle class productive workers to slowly suffocate and resort to debt leverage to buy lifes necessities while working ever increasing hours just to afford life.

Taxing the rapacious wealthy heavily for any compensation not re-invested to create high paying jobs domestically, capping executive compensation at a two digit multiple of the lowest paid worker in the company, and cutting out corporate subsidies for all corporations and industry groups will help restore balance. These moves will also restore capitalism and free market balance to the current system which resembles fascism far more than it does capitalism. It is ironic that the one plan that does this has been deemed "Socialist" by the Facists that have pillaged our economy for 30 years.