Word: problem
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...clear. Paulson and Bernanke described it as a way to jumpstart trading in mortgage securities for which there's no market at the moment, thus allowing banks to clean up their balance sheets and get back to lending. But a lot of economists outside government believe that the real problem is that lots and lots of financial institutions are insolvent--their losses, if they actually recognized them, are enough to wipe out their capital reserves. If that's true it would make more sense for taxpayers to give them cash outright, and take a big ownership stake in return (with...
...what to invest in? Can I get bailed out when my portfolio tanks? It's a variant on the old saw (often attributed to J. Paul Getty, although I'm sure somebody must have said something like it before him): "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem." Leveraged financial institutions (banks, investment banks, hedge funds) make investments with lots of borrowed money, so when their portfolios tank they can quickly get into a situation where they can no longer make good on their debts...
...should Wall Street be bailed out? Won't it just make them all the more eager to engage in risky practices in the future? Are we bailing out the very people who created the problem? A lot of the people who created the problem have already lost their jobs, but yes, any bailout risks rewarding the profligate and the foolish. But we're getting to the point where financial sector problems are starting to hurt people who didn't profit from the boom. And you can design a bailout that's not so much a bailout as a new start...
...make six figures out of college. We were never in it for the money. We were in it for the love of English, or music, or the classics, or because environmental science and public policy was too challenging. As our practical classmates divided their time between resolving economics problem sets and drawing up plans for penthouses, we answered the distant call to contribute something of ourselves to the human race. We had callings! We were going to be composers, or performance artists, or teachers for America! Not that we objected to money on principle. It was just not something...
...importance of negotiating with rogue states: "You will never solve your problem until you sit around the dinner table and put your grievances on the table and find out how to move forward ... Some people equate that with being soft - that if you do not pound the table and if you do not scream, then you are being soft. I think this is a total misconception...