OOPS- THE THREAD NOW APPEARS IN FULL SPLENDOR!!!

where did all the comments on this thread disapear to? There were about 20 of them . What happened??? Bear stearns buy Huffpo with the "Super Bailout" Cash??? Talk about big Brother!!!

Leveraged Derivatives - cheaper to just pay off mortgages

The way I understand it, the complex financial instruments that have blown up on Bear are leveraged, like stock bought on margin. Because the derivatives market is unregulated the margin ratio is much higher than with stocks, maybe ultimately 100-to-1.

This means that $100,000 in actual mortgage debt becomes $10 million worth of (now failing) complex derivatives.

Maybe if we used the $30 billion to create a moratorium on the actual mortgages we could provide a more effective fix. Then the derivative market could settle down without collapsing.

Also, fixing the problem at the level of the little guy would reduce downward pressure on the housing market. As long as the market is flooded wit cheap or foreclosed houses, no one can sell their house and all kinds of builders and construction people are out of work - a downward spiral

Why didn't the fed give the 30 million directly to Bear? What about Bear employees and their retirement and health care benefits? Ohh....the fire sale will negate all of that won't it? White collar benefit busting.

Why give 30 million to Chase to buy Bear?

I love that someone is testing one of the rotten Delaware incorporation rules - 40% selling w/o shareholder approval. This is the reason most US companies incorporate in Delaware - a race to the bottom for corporate-friendly majority-shareholder-friendly laws. Well, let's see if the shareholders like it now that Bear is set to use one of those laws to screw the minority shareholders. Perhaps shareholders of other corporations will think twice about incorporating in Delaware.

I went to a store the other day and paid $1.00 for something. What would you call me if I went back into that store and gave them $4.00 for that product today??? A moron??/ Stupid??? An idiot??? No---you'd call me " The Bush Administration"!!!!!

this is starting to smell more and more like a tax payer financed bail out. Remember all the people saying that this wasn't a bailout because the Bear Sterns shareholders were essentially getting nothing- well not true any more.

Why pay 4 imes the amount agreed upon??? The only reason is to help some Bush friends on Wall Street escape with 4 times the money---ALL PAID BY WE-THE TAXPAYERS!!! This deal stinks almost as bad as Cheney's taint!!!

People live without health care their entire lives but Corporate Socialism is alive and well! America. Bears is lucky they are getting anything at all. This what happens when too few have too much money and power. Greed will destroy us all.

Bear is an investment bank, and should not be bailed out by the FED. The FED should be making sure that the bankers aren't cheating everyone, but they failed at that. They have outlived whatever use they once had, and are now taking the nation down the path to utter ruination. Our lawmakers should be squawking and preventing this bailout at the expense of future generations, whose fortunes are dwindling with each day of this Republican-led, greed-driven, insane clown-o-rama we call our economy. An economy which rests on the shoulders of a working class whose life savings, what little is left, grows smaller in value with each passing day. This meltdown is the direct result of the Republican laissez-faire policies that prove disastrous to the working class whenever they are allowed. I just hope that if the cabal we call the FED leads us to depression, that the country will wake up and realize that the FED must go.

It does not matter what the price is: a competitive bidding did not occur, and the decision to sell-out the company was not put to a vote of a super-majority of the shareholders.

The Congress of the United States did not commit and was not asked to commit the resources of the United States toward the securing of this deal ... and let us not ignore the bald fact that this whole thing IS a very thinly disguised government bailout. Before you say "oh, but the rules aren't written that way," then let me not-so-gently remind you that the government's do-re-mi is you-and-me.

It's payback time for Reaganomics, and for the fifty-year rule of the Military Industrial Complex, both of which are now revealed to have utterly ruined many aspects of this nation in just that short amount of time. We can't repair their damage, and thus restore our lives and our livelihoods and our expectations of getting the promises in the Preamble to the Constitution, so long as we continue to pay even lip-service to those evil men's "illusions."

We followed a siren and a leprechaun. But it's morning now. The money's gone. And the Fed, really, doesn't have any money either.

So, do the shareholders get $10 a share instead of $2 under this plan? Or, will that extra $8 go to the paper handlers who cooked up this charade? Either way, it ain't going to stop the sharholders suits or SEC investigations.

Once a secret is disclosed is it still a secret?

If the shareholders reject the offer and go with someone else, then all the power to them.

The Fed can now take the tax payers 30 billion dollars back.

It's a free market republicans, right?

That is only fair after all once the govenment guaranteed its debts it should be at least valuable as its real estate. Whether the extra money should go to the existing shareholders or the govevernment that bailed them out is of course not a question that the Republicans believe is worth discusion.