Friday, October 03, 2008
Killing us softly with their songs
Several big life insurance stocks fell sharply Thursday, dragged down by jitters about their role in the credit crisis and fears sparked by a comment from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., Wednesday about a potential bankruptcy in the industry.Are our leaders all idiots? You don't say this stuff. It was only a couple of months ago that Chuck Schumer started a run on Indymac that lead to that bank's immediate demise. In case you didn't follow that saga amongst the Fannie/Freddie mess, it is nicely summarized on Schumers Wikipedia Page.
"We don't have a lot of leeway on time. One of the individuals in the caucus today talked about a major insurance company. A major insurance company -- one with a name that everyone knows that's on the verge of going bankrupt. That's what this is all about," Reid said prior to the Senate's approval of the $700 billion bailout bill.
In July, 2008, the director of the Office of Thrift Supervision, John Reich, blamed the failure of savings and loan and mortgage originator IndyMac on comments made in late June by Schumer, who sent a publicized letter to the regulator raising concerns about the bank's solvency. Schumer wrote that he was "concerned that IndyMac's financial deterioration poses significant risks to both taxpayers and borrowers and that the regulatory community may not be prepared to take measures that would help prevent the collapse of IndyMac." In the following 11 days, panicked depositors withdrew a total of $1.3 billion in mostly insured funds. Reich said Schumer gave the bank a "heart attack" and opined, "Would the institution have failed without the deposit run? We'll never know the answer to that question"This is the kind of stuff that really gives me faith that a bunch of pandering lawyers in Washington can fix our financial system.
4 Comments:
By 
, at
Fri Oct 03, 07:11:00 AM:
It is only incompetence as long as you are assuming that Reid or Schumer are on our side and feel terrible sorry about damaging these companies.
Once you part with that assumption you can see that they are successful in using this crisis for partisan advantage. At the same time they suffer no consequences for their part in it.
Call them base, cynical, even criminal. But not stupid. It´s only stupid if it doesn´t work for them.
By , at
Fri Oct 03, 10:56:00 AM:
"Incompetence" doesn't begin to describe it. More adjectives are needed.
By , at
Fri Oct 03, 02:48:00 PM:
Is this the same Harry Reid who declared the war lost, hoping it would be?
I see evidence of a malign pattern, but maybe that's just me.
By 
Georg Felis, at
Sat Oct 04, 08:11:00 PM:
Once is an accident, twice is incompetence, three times is malice. I think we’re at about twelve or thirteen for those idiots.
They remind me of the old fire departments who sold fire insurance, and would go by a business, “Nice business you got here. Shame if anything happened to it. Looks pretty flammable.”
