Carl Fisher wrote:
Chuck Branscomb wrote:
Follow the money trail -- the number of special interests lining up at the trough is beyond anything ever seen in the past. Orders of magnitude beyond. I guess it will be a fun party for some while the debt spending lasts.
Have you followed the money trail, Chuck? Can you provide us a list of the special interests you've identified? Looking through the bill, I do not see a whole lot of special interests lined up, at least not ones that can be credibly be argued to be in there (such as specifying only US-manufactured steel in contruction projects). There actually a pretty good transparency and accountability provision here- all grantees (Federal, state, local) must post: the amount of their grant, what they're going to do with it, how much it will cost, and contact information at the agency if there are questions, all on the website at
www.recovery.gov.
I haven't been through the entire thing, but most of the money Ryan listed does seem to be going to infrastructure projects, whether as grants or loans. If I had a little more time, it would be interesting to take those figures and pump them into Google Charts to come up with a pie chart. The trick would be that you'd really need to tag them with keywords so they could be grouped in various ways- there are so many items that no individual slice would likely be very visible.
Carl,
You've been around long enough to know how government spending works. The whole trick at the current time is to line up at the trough. Plenty of people will massively enrich themselves through companies setup to take advantage of the largest handout of public debt in the history of our country. The trick is to make sure you are in the food chain somewhere along that path. I'm glad I don't and won't be a part of it however.
Just look how well managed the "bail out" that started with Fannie and Freddie and Bear Stearns has "worked" -- our government in action. They have completely pushed out all private sector risk and destroyed a whole and very important part of ours and the world's economy. The smart guys got on board with the government (i.e. Bill Gross) by riding their coattails, buying MBS' and anything else the government was now going to take the risk out of (i.e. even commercial paper got T-bill like backing from the Feds!).
The trade of the century was last October 3rd. The moment, literally the exact moment, that the massive bailout bill passed the Congress, all you had to do was go completely short the S&Ps. Your realized risk was nothing as there was no drawdown on the trade. It took off downward, never looking back in part because the risk taking world (i.e. investment world) knew the future was going to be nothing like the past from that moment on. Socialism it is. That was ~1150 on the S&P.
Since the vast majority, it seems, of Americans don't really care and a huge number have no idea, I for one REALLY hope this "new" future works...for my kid's sake as I'm into my second 1/2 century now. It's a grand experiment that has the most profound implications, but that's all we have for it..."hope."
Often when emotions are THIS involved in large financial decisions, humans almost without exception choose the wrong path -- let's "hope" this isn't the case at this moment in history.
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