Things that kinda amaze me

Old news, but I was watching last week's Daily Show, and they reminded me of something I was thinking of when I was listening to the news.

So GM, Ford, and Chrysler need cash.  Lots of it.   There's a fair debate whether we should give it to them or not, and some people are saying that we should just let them fail.  They went to DC last week to make their sales pitch to Congress for their $25 Billion.

And they flew there on private jets.   Dumb move.  And Congress is staffed by human beings who have emotions and get angry over relatively trivial and irrelevant stuff like this.   Maybe they were just grandstanding (they are politicians, after all).   But think about this: if there is no bailout, and if the vote is close, it is entirely possible that in fifty years there will be no American-owned automakers because of this little act of political tone-deafness.

Kind of amazing.

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On another note: we talked with some back and forth about whether we (in our awesomeness) think the government should bail out the automakers.   This conversation was given a lot of thought as a weighty and serious matter with huge stakes on the outcome.  I mean $25 Billion is a lot of money and 3 million jobs is a lot of livelihoods, right?

So today I read that the Fed took a $40 billion dollar stake in AIG.  This is on top of the (I forget) $100 billion-plus in loans they have gotten.   I mean, WTF?   There was no "debate" whether AIG should get the money -- the Fed (or the treasury, whichever) just gave it to them.  I guess they can do that.   Is it really possible that AIG's failure would be so much worse than the failure of all three automakers that it's worth six times the cash with no congressional approval?

Yeah, yeah, I know -- the government shouldn't be picking winners and losers.  But we're all Keynsians now, also, right?   

This thing is so fucked up.