Let's Talk About The Bailouts

Everyone who just watched that debate heard Obama claim that every penny of the bank bailouts were paid back with interest. I've heard him make this claim before, and if I'm not mistaken, he said they pulled it off in 2 years. Now I'm having a hard time believing that, but let's say for the sake of argument that he's telling the truth...

Someone please explain to me how a FAILING super-bank get's a huge chunk of money from the government, then within 2 years pays all of the money back plus interest? How did they do that?

And when you're finished explaining that to me, please explain to me why we don't do this all the time.

the best answer is just like anything in wallstreet, is that they weren't as bad off as lead to believe.

what probably happened is they lost all credibility with their lenders, the international banking cartel, which cut off their money supply.

possibly on purpose, so their ponzi scheme was about to collapse.

with the bailout money, they were able to continue to make payments to important investors. i.e. the architects of the scheme and those who keep it running.

where these sharks usually get their feed, is from mickey mouse investors, the people who have $5,000 in stocks and think they're gordon gekko, and have no clue about the nasdaq, beside more points good, less points bad.

they are at the mercy of stock brokers, who pluck away at them telling them where to invest until the hammer drops in a year and wipes them out.

when all these minnows got scared and demanded their money, the trough dried up, and they were all about to collapse.

the bailout refilled the trough, building up the minnows confidence to swim back to the trap, the stock exchange, where their greed at all this food makes them easy pickings for the sharks.

The problem I find with believing a statement like that is that most of our money that was used to 'bailout' those banks actually went to banks that had made bets, or used credit default swaps essentially, against those banks failing. When those banks failed, they had huge debts to pay to the banks that had bet on the subprime mortgage loans defaulting. Our money went to those banks so they could pay those other banks/investment firms what they were owed. Also as we now know, much of our money went to European banks. So I'm not really sure how it could be paid back, and if it was... Why? That doesn't seem to jive with the whole plan in the first place. Seems like a blatant lie to me.

Henry Paulson, for example, was head of Goldman Sachs before becoming Secretary of the Treasury during the bailouts. At Goldman, he helped not only make sure that subprime mortgages were being dished out so they had some commodities to bet on/make money on, but he turned around and bet against them. So when they defaulted, they got paid. They also were complicit in helping the credit ratings agencies rate some of those derivatives as AAA when they were actually pieces of crap.

It was a huge scam.

reply to post by Bone75

While TARP was a banker bailout, its a smoke screen, a distraction.

It was a lot more than a few hundred billion.

The first audit of the privately owned and foreign owned Federal Reserve by the GAO,has turned up $16 Trillion dollars of loans all over the world to prop up the global fiat empire.