Congress will be voting on the bailout bill again tomorrow and I hope it doesn’t pass. I can’t condone such an enormous sum of money in the form of what is essentially a blank check, to save these financial institutions who have run themselves into the ground. When a business fails, it fails; our government shouldn’t be handing out lifelines that we cannot even afford.

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“Even before the opening bell, Monday looked ugly. But by the time that bell sounded again on the New York Stock Exchange, seven and a half frantic hours later, $1.2 trillion had vanished from the United States stock market. What had started 24 hours earlier, with a modest sell-off in stock markets in Asia, had turned into Wall Street’s blackest day since the 1987 crash. The broad market, as measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, plunged almost 9 percent, its third-biggest decline since World War II. The Dow Jones industrial average fell nearly 778 points…Across Wall Street, no one could quite believe what was happening on the floor — the floor of the House of Representatives, not the New York Exchange.”
[For Stocks, Worst Single-Day Drop in Two Decades via the NYT]

“Stocks had fallen from the get-go Monday morning. In addition to expectations for the bailout, there was also news that troubled Wachovia had to sell its banking assets to Citigroup. A number of European banks also collapsed.” [Stocks crushed via CNN]

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The effect of the U.S. financial crisis on the global economy:

“Global central banks scrambled to relieve a severe squeeze in money markets by more than doubling the amount of dollar funding to $620 billion as banks hoarded cash, bracing for more trouble ahead in the worsening credit crisis.”  
[U.S. bailout blow triggers stampede to safety via IHT]

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According to the latest issue of TIME magazine, this is what you could do with $700,000,000,000:

  • Give each person in the U.S. $2,300
  • Pay the income tax of every American making less than $500,000
  • Fully fund the Defense, Treasury, Education, State, Veterans Affairs, and Interior Departments – as well as NASA
  • Buy gasoline for every car in the U.S. for 16 months
  • Buy every NFL, NBA, and MLB team, build each a new stadium, and then pay the players $191 million a year
  • Or, you could pay off 7% of the $9.8 trillion national debt

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Also, these 7 Questions About the $700 Billion Bailout are answered via TIME:

  1. Will it really cost $700 billion?
  2. How long will the money last?
  3. Is this kind of bailout unprecedented?
  4. How will the Federal Government know what price to pay for the mortgages it buys?
  5. What happens if the cost tops $700 billion?
  6. Will all of the federal wheeling and dealing come with transparency and oversight?
  7. Do the Wall Street executives get to keep their bonuses?

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A recap of the last two weeks (the ones that broke Wall Street): The crisis: A timeline via CNN