Never has so much been given by so many to so few

Alternative headlines:

Profits Privatized, Losses Socialized.

Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest of us.

When you go to Yahoo, or goodness forbid watch TV "news" you get articles that quote "experts" and some such on this fiscal crisis.

Me, I go to reddit.

neo_07:

thank god...i work for a big bank in ny and was getting really worried for a bit. Looks like i can go to the bahamas after all.

The_Cake_Is_A_Lie responds to the dry sarcasm:

Yes, the poor people who can't afford gas and pay their mortgages have bailed out your holiday to the Bahamas. Capitalism rocks.

Never has so much been given by so many to so few.

I particlarly love this comment.

Lets repeat it.
Never has so much been given by so many to so few.

And this one explains the situation much more clearly than any "expert" on TV:

MrFlesh:

Let me get this straight...banks knowingly sell bad loans, they then knowingly package these loans into bad investments which they then sell, they do this while at the same time betting the housing market will crash.......and then they get bailed out by the very same people conned into the bad loans in the first place. So the tax payer gets stuck with a loan they cannot afford and then get stuck with the bill to help bail out the crooks that sold them the loan? How fucked up is that?

See - this whole crisis is very simple to understand.

Step one - banks and investment "banks" make bad loans.
Step two - they sell these shitty loans for profit, insured by AIG.
Step three - the people who were conned by these criminals (us, the taxpayers) will now reward these conmen (remember, the CEO's and CIO's made millions already; more on that later) with our money.

jabb0 asks a very good question:

So Tax payers will pick up the debt, the Banks get the profit, Why haven't we burned down DC yet?

octony7 bring some history to the fore:

Henry Paulson was Goldman Sachs CEO before he became Treasury Secretary. Did people think he was going to forget to give his investment banker friends a hand? Imagine that, you can keep making moronic bets on the most unlikely things -- if you win, you get to keep the profits. If you lose, pass the bill on to Uncle Sam. From an investment banker's point of view, that scheme is brilliant!

Indeed.

About that free market thing, user eddie964 explains:

Next time I hear a Republican talking about free-market capitalism, I'm going to punch him. The government now owns 70 percent of the mortgages in the United States, two major financial firms, and -- after this bailout -- just about everything else.

This concludes Market Quotes from Non Experts.

Have a nice day, America.

G'day, World.

PS
The source is this reddit comment section.

Bonus Material
Ah, the ruling class. The elites. It's fun being the king.

Alternet.org reports:

Last month, at a Hilton Hotel ballroom in New York, things turned ugly for some of Wall Street’s most eminent power suits. The occasion: the annual meeting of Citigroup, the financial colossus that last year wrote off $20.4 billion in subprime-related losses — and has so far this year lost another $9.1 billion.
On hand for the annual meeting: over a thousand angry Citi shareholders. They packed the ballroom. And they wanted answers — about the remarkably cushy rewards that continue to flow to Citigroup’s top executives.

How cushy? In January, just a month after Citi's CEO through the worst of the mortgage mess left the company with an exit package worth $42 million, Citigroup’s board of directors awarded that CEO's chief financial officer, Gary Crittenden, a $12 million “retention bonus.”

Lets back up there a second.

The Citi CEO left the company with $42 million in his (bulging) wallet, and Citi board of directors gave the CFO $12 million retention bonus.

This during the biggest fiscal crisis since the 1930's Great Depression.


The elites get paid 407 times what you or I get paid.

That's four hundred and seven times your salary, bud.

This is the only country in the world that has this type of a gulf between the rich and the poor (well, I mean in the first world, in the industrialized countries. In, say, Mexico, or Nigeria, this kind of shit is standard operating procedure).

AFLCIO.org:

In 2007, the CEO of a Standard & Poor’s 500 company received, on average, $14.2 million in total compensation, according to preliminary numbers from The Corporate Library, a corporate governance research firm. The median compensation package received was $8.8 million.

The money paid to these liars and cheats, who kept the bubble going (with a wink wink and a nod from Bernanke who kept the rates low) during the fake boom, based on lies, bullshit and shuffling of papers - that money is sacred.

The CEO's and CFO's will now leave their wrecks of companies, while pocketing from $10-50 million.

The Board of Directors in a typical company is made up of... CEO's and CFO's of other companies, so this amounts to a good old boy fraternity giving each other suitcases (sorry, airplanes) full of money, quid pro quo.

And now they are rewarded for swindling the world, and lying to us.

And the government is actually buying up the bad debt.

Isn't "free" market fun?

It has been said before, and it will be said again and again.

Profits Privatized, Losses Socialized.

Meaning that when they - the ruling class, our betters, our leaders - make money, that money is sacred, should not be touched, taxed, regulated, markets should be deregulated, free market is a god.

But when they - the liars, the swindlers, the thieves, the con artists - lose money, we, the taxpayers, are here to help them out in their hour of need.

LA Times blog: CNBC: Bailout may cost half a trillion dollars.

Really?

Lets go to Financial Times, to make a point

Heavy costs will be inflicted on the American taxpayer, who is now subsidising Wall Street – and indeed financial institutions around the world – in a bail-out of unprecedented size.

Still more startling was news that the Federal Reserve was advancing $85bn (€59bn, £47bn) of taxpayers’ money to AIG, the world’s biggest private insurer.

We, the taxpayers, are paying our tax money so that these guys can survive, because to let them fail would result in a Great Depression 2 - which is true.

But why is no one asking - where is the SEC, where was the FED when these guys were scamming the world (and us) with their bubble economy, built on bullshit and shuffling papers, effectively playing a shell game whose point was NOT do discover exactly where did all the money go?

Where was the SEC?

Where was the FED?

Why didn't they act in time to prevent this - why didn't they do their fucking job and regulate the markets before this catastrophe?

(Answer - because they wanted to keep the bubble going, obviously).

How much is $85 billion for each American?

As of this moment, there are 305,200,298 of us Americans.

I get $279 for each American man, women and child.

Just for AIG.

But don't worry, MORE money is being set aside and pumped into the "free" market to "save" it. Right now. Unprecedented "rescue" package.

The $279 per an American is just the start, a measly $279 - surely you can give more, America?

And who are we saving?

These guys.

The guys who made $10, $20, $50 million while running this scam:

As Michael Lewitt, the Florida-based money manager, puts it: “Allowing investment banks to be leveraged to the tune of 30 to 1 is the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with five of the six chambers of the gun loaded. If one adds the off-balance-sheet liabilities to this leverage, you might as well fill the sixth chamber with a bullet and pull the trigger.”

Do you go to a casino and borrow $30 for every dollar that you have in the bank to play games?

And when you lose, do you then expect to be bailed out?

Do you invest $30 to each dollar you make in the stockmarket as a private citizen?

Of course not - that would be fucking insane.

As a private person, a Joe Schmuck like myself, you put up a percentage of your money in the stockmarket - 1, 2, 5, perhaps if you are really a gambler (like me, say) 20%.

Somehow I do not see you or me for that matter investing 3000% of your money in the stockmarket. Yes, even I, the gambler, the stockmarket addict, have my limits.

But, fortunately, these CFO's and CEO's are all so much smarter than us, the cattle, and that is why they make the BIG (big, big, biiiiiiiiiiiiig) bucks, and I am just a lowly blog writer, and you are just a schmuck who reads my articles.

So come on, American taxpayer - pay up!

A balding white guy needs an extra island in the Bahamas.

Lets not keep him waiting.

Pay up, America.