About September, 2008...
2009-02-12
Posted by: badanov
Current making the rounds in blog is a youtube.com video of democrat representative Paul Kanjorski describing how the Troubled Asset Relief program came into being:
On Thursday Sept 15, 2008 at roughly 11 AM The Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw down of money market accounts in the USA to the tune of $550 Billion dollars in a matter of an hour or two. Money was being removed electronically.
The Treasury tried to help, opened their window and pumped in $150 Billion but quickly realized they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. So they decided to closed down the accounts.
Had they not closed down the accounts they estimated that by 2 PM that afternoon. Within 3 hours. $5.5 Trillion would have been withdrawn and the entire economy of the United States would have collapsed, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed.
Apparently, then treasury secretary Henry Paulson began his campaign to get Congress to fund a bank rescue totally $700 billion.
The link is to Atlas Shrugs blog, but I listened to a reference to this same story on Rush Limbaugh as well last Tuesday. Coming away from that I was surprised that Limbaugh would even refer to the story,but he did.
He didn't mention it in the part of the program I head, as rightfully so.
You can read about the story from any number of other conservative/rightwing blogs where the implication was that socialist billionaire George Soros had a hand in last fall's meltdown, and the disasterous electoral results.
Of course, that is not the story I heard or read. The money market run was precipitated by margin calls various financial institutions globally were encountering as a direct result of the Lehman Brothers liquidation and bankruptcy. Once the funds started to be withdrawn, mutual funds began dumping their stock in order to cover their own positions, which lead to the meltdown.
I had read about it concurrent to the event and at the time it seemed a reasonable explanation why we were experiencing a cascading crash of equities.
I don't know if it is even conceivable that a billionaire would not find a better haven to park his spare cash than a money market mutual fund. It seems to me that shorting crude oil was the thing to do at the time.
So, I have to quarterback this thing out.
Let's say that George Soros in fact did have $550 billion parked in various money market funds. What would the scam then be? As I understand, many money market funds have a delay clause whereby you can't just pull your entire portfolio all at once; there is a waiting period.
Even if Soros was not subject to a waiting period before receiving his money, what would be the benefit of helping a left-wing government gain power?
Because he wanted to pay more taxes? Because he wanted to see his investments sour as the equities tanked before his eyes as a direct result of his perfidy? If he had investments in US Treasuries, why would he want to see the long term deflation of those assets because of a profligate government?
Where's the scam? What's the payoff? What is the percentage?
Surely in such an event, the US government has records of the transactions and could conceivably trace them to him: Why would he take the risk in pissing off a government known to invade countries just to take custody of a criminal?
His known investments in moveon.org and Medimatters.org and any number of other left-wing ventures/groups would be tainted for all time by his action. Why kill several working investments and eventually his ideal of seeing a socialist US just to take a terrible risk to his personal wealth with such an action?
I suspect, this individual in the above link was lead to the video in the hopes she could get a lot of rightwingers upset that their election was "stolen" from them by George Soros. She has a helluva jump on that right now.
Why this "story" has no legs, nor will even have any legs is because it is Soros' money and he can do what he likes with it. If he wanted to influence a US election by starting an equities avalanche, more power to him.
The crazier of our beloved rightwingers have forgotten about private property if they choose to sew some legs on this "story." It is just a waste of time and perfectly good tinfoil hat wearing time.
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