Letter to my Senator
Sept. 23, 2008
Dear Mr. Obama,
I know you are busy with your presidential campaign, but I wanted to take a moment to write you and urge you to return to Congress to fix the President's bailout proposal. America needs leadership on this issue now and you are the person to provide it. I've supported your campaign both as my Senator and as President. While something legislative probably needs to be done about our financial system, the President and his administration have not made that clear.
First, in the interest of transparency, please urge Sec. Paulson to make his presentation today on the state of the economy public. We can't trust the Bush administration on anything and the public deserves to see the data and have it reviewed by independent economists.
Second, urge restraint on Congress. It has been almost a week since Sec. Paulson announced his plan and no new major firms have gone into crisis. In fact, the remaining investment banks are working to shore up their capital positions without any government assistance. This program may be totally unnecessary.
Third, there is no reason Congress needs to commit to the full $700B budget immediately. Sec. Paulson testified in Congress today that he expects to spend about $50B a month. Given that timetable, Congress could simply allocate $150B now and then consider whether more needs to be spent later when it returns to session in January.
Finally, there is absolutely no reason why the financial firms need be given incentives to participate in this program. This should be a last-resort measure for troubled institutions and as such they should accept nearly any condition on receiving the funds, including the dilution of equity in their firm. The taxpayers deserve to be compensated for their increased risk.
Thank you for considering my comments. For full disclosure, I work in the trading and finance industry in Chicago and have donated several hundred dollars to your presidential campaign. We need your leadership now. Please demonstrate how you would lead as president.
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I've also written a similar article to my other Senator, Richard Durbin and my Representative, Luis Gutierrez.
Dave Y.: 2008-09-24 10:22:44
Again, I agree with all this. The real question is what Obama would do. Obama has almost never broken with his party on any major vote. Yet the Democrats are the ones calling for bigger government. I see no reason why he wouldn't go along with the bailout.
Also, all the political polls and stories have pointed to the importance of demographics lately, especially race. This bodes ill for Obama, and suggests that he may be behind 6 percent in the polls if people were more honest (as they are in online polls). If I could make a legal bet on this I would. My intrade bet has already paid off handsomely.
It's sad that race is stll such an issue.
Matt: 2008-09-24 10:37:53
Yeah my guess is Obama won't even show up to vote because Congress will settle on some sort of compromise that makes his support or lack thereof meaningless. I'm not even sure there's a crisis any more since the big investment banks have found new capitalization and there seems to be plenty of money for mortgage loans and other credit right now. The only sign of disaster is the LIBOR rate which is unusually high.
Dave Y.: 2008-09-24 20:55:09
Again, I agree with you. But Obama almost never breaks with his party, and Democrats are always for bigger government. What makes you think he wouldn't support a bailout?
It may be a moot point anyway. Here's a link showing that the race would perhaps be tied except for Obama's race:
http://origin.nydailynews.com/news/po...
Instead, he's probably more like 6% back in the polls due to his race. I'd bet the farm on Intrade if it were legal. As it is, my funny money bet on McCain has paid off handsomely so far.
Matt: 2008-09-24 23:22:31
I'm sure he'd support a bailout. It seems all of Congress wants a bailout at this point. The economic data that Paulson and Bernanke presented must look pretty grim. Most of the economics blogs on the other hand seem to be skeptical of the plan. They question the need to any action and this action in particular. One interesting idea I heard was just for the government to seize defaulting properties and continue to make the mortgage payments while renting to the previous owner.
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