The issue behind is leadership. We don't have any. The world's "e con oh me," (to adopt the language of jack-foot, the missing poster - I think his alias was legs, not foot, but the beastie thought police also removed every thing he wrote in their archive - what's up with that?) in America, leadership, relative to the economy is just that, a foursome of lobbyists and congressional committee chair people on a golf course trying to fig a way to shaft me out of my take home pay. e con oh me.

The money Congress dumped into the banks, A.I.G. etc is money we don't really have, so the printing presses are running while the economy contracts world wide and consumers everywhere are sitting on what they have. Sooner rather than later a stick of chewing gum will go for a buck, while 320 gigs of hard drive sells for less than $70.

Doesn't that tell you our elected officials don't have a clue what to do? The corporate bailout seems more like a political payoff then economic solution.

This article begins with a faulty premise. It assumes that the goal of the federal government was to make money from it's investments. It wasn't. If you recall, the goal was to support an economic system driven to the breaking point by greed and a lack of responsibility.
Uncle Sam's real stock market problem was a total lack of oversight by the money police and a total flood of self-interest and greed by the people making the trades.
Let's not get fooled again.

Still chasing after quarterly profits? Isn't that short term outlook part of what started this mess?

Ok, I was never for any of the bailouts. There are plenty of smaller players that could have risen up to might demand that didn't make the foul mistakes of the bloated big banks. They all should have failed. I can only assume we did this to honor the contracts of foriegn countries so that they will continue to do business with U.S. companies in the future. However, we should have honored those contracts and still allowed the big banks to fail... Onward...

Despite the bailouts, this article is not fair. The bailouts aren't for the short haul. They are for a long term. I suppose he states this in the last paragraph, but then he goes back to talking about how the government isn't good at stock picking. The government isn't a stock picker in the first place. It would be like calling be a terrible Doctor...Well sure, but I'm not a Doctor in the first place!

The "investments" by the government are much worst than that because the author failed to include the taxpayer bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; and the $306 billion in government guarantees for Citigroup securities and the $115 billion in guarantees for Bank of America securities and the $33 billion in guarantees for Bear Stearns securities. It also doesn't include the $60 billion tax loss carry forward Wells Fargo was able to take with the acquisition of Wachovia. There are so many other costs such as the expansion of the Federal Reserve balance sheet, FHA loan guarantees, zero Fed fund rates, a TALF program and the reminder of the $700 billion TARP that haven't been factored into the author's analysis. The financial meltdown caused by a greed Wall Street and aided an abetted by rating agencies and the Congress is a several trillion cost to the taxpayers. Now the contagion has spread to the auto industry where taxpayers will never see a penny back from the failed Chrysler and will provide tens of billions more to GM. In the near future this failure will spread to health care as the government seeks to impose its wisdom onto the healthcare industry. This will lead to a situation as large as the financial meltdown because the health industry is larger than the financial industry.

The messages are that bailouts are bad and just prolong the problem and that you can't get something for nothing (its costs money.)

Premature! Uncle Sam is going to make it all back through those distressed investments in GM and Chrysler.