Comments on Pictures from the Floating World

this is all so depressing. of course, we saw it coming a mile away, but now it's just seem so...awful. my prediction: those in the drug trade will do quite well in the coming years.

We are going to be fine. The last thing we need to do is to give these fucking thugs, and that is all they are, $700 Billion under the threat we are all doomed if we don't.

Bush and his crooks have lied to us too many times. Besides, there is no one who is positive that the bail out would have worked in the first place; it was just Bush's cronies last push to get the last couple of pennies out of the treasury before they dump it on Obama's lap in January.

Congress finally found some balls and stood up to Bush and Wall Street. There just maybe some hope after all.

Goldman is the company that everyone else loves to hate because they make money better than any other company in their class.

Their average salary isn't really that impressive considering that I'm sure there are fund managers pulling in 8+ figures. I wanna know their median salary, that's gonna be far more telling because they probably have a janitor that makes like 40k or something.

I propose nationalizing just Goldman Sachs, and then executing every single one of those 30,522 (with an exemption for anyone making less than, say, $50k). A hundred a day, in Battery Park. How do you like that suggestion, BA?

I think you either are losing money in your 401(k) in a bad way today or you're trying to get a rise out of me.

I know why it failed! Because you can't vote in good conscience for a half millon dollar golden parachute. Even if it were paid out above that, which wouldn't be taxed, we'd be in the same place at tax time.

I'm glad it failed!

If this was the People's Republic of China, these officials would be led out in front of cameras and shot.

Dang! I got behind on my SLOG reading. Someone remind me again why this is all Jonathan Golob's fault.

Hmm, Paulson was at Goldman, it gets bailed out, but its competition is allowed to go under and be purchased...

nice.

@8 and then we could down a big glass of melamine milk while inhaling various dangerous particulate matter and then be unable to post our thoughts online. Police states are so great!

how was goldman bailed out by the government? They received infusions of cash from private investors (either individual or corporate)

@5 Sweet! And then can we raid their houses in the Hamptons and their condos in the city and take all their good stuff and re-distribute it too?

Viva la Revolution!!!!

I'm down for all sorts of executions, but can we use the guillotine? I want to knit as the heads roll into the baskets.

Ok, we've cleared the deck and are back to where we were pre-Bush in the stock market. Let's get Obama in office and rebuild ourselves into a powerhouse again.

Goldman has not been bailed out directly . . . yet. But as a result of AIG getting bailed out, Goldman avoided a $20 billion dollar loss on its credit derivatives which were insured by AIG. So, bailing out AIG directly saved Goldman indirectly

Seven hundred billion dollars! What fucking insanity. Who told people they won't lose money in the stock market? This is a rich peoples bail out. If I invested my whole retirement in the stock market and expected to have just oodles of money some day, I'd be a fool. They should flood the Small Business Administration with cheap capital for loans and give the people another stimulus payment. Fuck Wall Street.

that 700 bil number? That number wasn't chosen by any specific criteria except it was a shit ton of money.

@18, To back up BA here, let me once again post the quotation from a spokeswoman at Treasury to Forbes.com last Tuesday:

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Can I play pull a really big number out of my butt too? Uh, uh, uuuuuuunh. Let me clean it off a bit....Oooo, looks like 62 quadrillion.

@6, I am absolutely SHOCKED that you would suggest even for a second that I might get a smidgen of enjoyment from winding you up.

@19: If I were a kid and it was still 1970 or something, I would have said, "Nuh-uh, 62 GOOGOL! But things were different then.

Paulson is a good guy. He didn't even want the job to begin with. He's given an insane amount of money to conservation organizations. Most of his fortune will be left to environmental groups.

See: http://www.pbs.org/wsw/news/fortunearticle_20031229_01.html

@21: Indeed they were. For one, our financial overlords were more prudent in their irresponsibility.