Ladies and gentlemen, with banks continuing to go down (Wachovia is the latest casualty folks), and with so much information flying around from all over the place, it's always refreshing to sit down, calm down, and have someone simply, and calmly, explain things and put it all into perspective. This morning on NPR's Morning Edition, Chris Arnold puts the "where do we go from here" and "how serious is this really" explanations out there in a very understandable way. You can click here to listen to that story.
BY THE WAY: NPR has a lot of good stories and sound bites up on their website to help you to understand the situation even better. You've got to love public radio!
17 comments:
we're so freakin skrewed! how do we get out of this? and wat r we supposed to b doing untill thurs? twiddle our thumbs? ppl are falling every second, and they take a few DAYS off? wat the heck!! grrr!
well there was a 500 point jump today, and who knows where we will be tomorrow.
also Wachovia isn't dead completely yet. it still has some chance of coming back. Since there are a publicly traded company, they would have had to ask the shareholder[me and my parents] for permission to do the buy-out [idk what to call it] and they decided to freeze everything until the bill has passed, so when they come and ask stockholders for permission the could still be a bank.
idk, this is the most confusing buy-out i have ever heard of, please shed some light on the Mr. Prill
first of all, miss niemann, many americans are not "twiddling their thumbs" this week because they are celebrating the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), so that's the reason for the time off in Congress (our rights to freely practice religion unimpeded stay intact despite any financial process). the way the jewish calander works is that the day begins at sundown. therefore, tomorrow night the senate will begin to vote on this bill. i trust it will pass through the senate. after all, it was the house everyone was worried about from day one, not the senate.
the term "buy-out" is probably not the term that should be used. i think the terminology has led americans to be misinformed as to the real nature of this bill (aka the american public will NOT be footing the full bill of $700 billion), and this has led them to flood the offices of their congressmen with phone calls telling them to vote against this bill (having not read the actual bill which is available online to read now) that they don't understand, and so i think that's a huge reason for the bill not passing on monday because these congressmen (even though they are far more knowledgeable about the plan than their angry constituents) are worried more about re-election in 5 weeks than anything else. in order to fully understand what's going on, you have to have a good working knowledge of the political process and economics.
If all these bank and insurance companys are crashing, whats going to happen to important services we need such as hospitals? if they rely so heavily on insurance, what happens if the company they use crashes?
Just to show how bad it is my dad has lost over 15000 dollars out of his retirement fund
It seems to me that we are in a huge not that needs to be untangled really badly. He mentions that people should not be taking money out of the banks which i think is exactly what people need to hear. We dont want another stock market crash but with banks. People just have a problem of panicking leading to more harm than good. You would think that we should learn from our mistakes from the early 20th century. Thats the problem with us. We are too busy looking at the future when we need to look at the past since in this case, history repeats itself.
what is the government going to do to fix this problem? from the npr story, it sounds like they've tried so many things, but its not making anything much better. no one has come up with a plan to do anything.... when is our government going to DO something to get us out of this mess?
i completely agree with becca. people get so freaked out and panic... hint hint why do u think we have huge lines at the gas stations. granted there are gas shortages but come on people if we use our heads for just a couple minutes then we will see that we are making it harder on ourselves. if ur so afraid of running out of gas then work form home if u can. maybe not everyone can do that but heres another thought... instead of making a lot of little trips at different times do all ur shoppin at once. u will use less gas and wont freak everytime there is gas at a station. mr. prill i thik some people just need to calm down. yes we are going through a difficult time but we are making it harder by not using our brains!
The commentary made a good point. The economic crisis has been going on now for about a year and we're just starting to get serious about it. Why now are people just starting to get really worried and trying hard to come up with solutions? Do we really have to see things get this bad to make enough people actually care about and try to solve the problem? I hope this is not what America has come to.
Here we go, my prediction of a second stock market crash is well on its way to cominng true. If people continue to panic and take all their money out of the stock market, my prediction will carry through successfully.
I agree with both Elizabeth and Becca as far as how everyone is panicked and scared...a lot of this was covered on the vp debate last night!! who watched it?? it was pretty interesting. (and humorous...I love watching fake politician smiles) :)
We are screwed but as long as people make right decisions, we will escape out of this. This reminds me of IMF in 1997 in Korea which was just as terrible locally. However this is more global. So I think it will take long time to recover than for Korea ri IMF
The house voted yes today. its on to bush now. hopefully he will do somthing right and approve it.
This is REALLY serious.
But it seems like we're not doing much while this is going on. >_<"
Why would these people TAKE A FEW DAYS OFF!? --;
I agree that people really need to relax and not be as panicked as they are at the moment about the issues. If this problem has been going on for a year, we should have tried to take care of it before it became this big mess. I think it's kind of humorous that people aren't thinking logically at all. Especially with the latest gas shortage. People assume that they need to get several gallons to fill up their tank everytime there is somewhere that has gas. While they're attempting to do so, they're sitting in lines that last forever burning off another several gallons of gas as opposed to filling up your car. I like how they mentioned that guy who's been studying the Great Depression and what not during most of his adult life. This makes people realize that this issue is nothing new. History is repeating itself, and we're basically just sitting here letting it happen by making the same mistakes.
well technically its Friday now and well the economy is still not looking that good. Even though the house has passed the bail-out bill and our country's givernement is working on trying to improve our economy, i turely think that the bill wont help dramatically, but maybe a little.
I believe the underlying question is "How will this affect communities and society in general?". Society and its communities revolve around economy, it crashes, they crash.
Also, as Madison stated about the economic crash. We're just now coming up with solutions. First are quick fixes, to give us time to negotiate and rationalize, like using $700bn to stabilize the economy, and then find long-term solutions. If I may use an analogy...Economy is like a mental patient. You know they're going to go off the deep end sooner or later, but you don't know when and at times, the signs are difficult to spot.
We have to come up with a solution, but we need time to cool off. I know you people who are freaking out about how people aren't freaking out need to stop freaking out and realize people who freaked out cause this economic crisis. "People are most innovative at times of crisis." Sound familiar? If freaking out caused crisis, innovation spurs from rationalization through a sense of calm and collectiveness while under the pressures of the current situation. Therefore, to innovate we have to "take a few days off" and think about it, let's just hope it's enough.
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