So you see Elroy, it has begun. Florida wants its pound of flesh. Alabama will want its. And Mississippi, etc, etc, etc. Some BP employee would like to get paid, and its CFO needs to borrow overnight to pay the poor bugger but it can't because nobody will lend to BP because....Florida and Alabama and whomever are nosing in at the front of the line.
All I am saying is that this thing is big. Big. Big. Big.
So big that BP will cease to be able to function as a normal business, and then it will be dead.
It isn't too much different from Chrysler or GM, or Citi, or FNE/FRE, or Capital One, or General Electric - all of whom should have been sent to their graves. There is one big difference. BP has money and makes a product people want. So we should kill it and eat its carcass. Personally I would rather have a dead GM and a free model of one of the last cars off the line then a moribund GM which will need another bailout in a few years. I really don't want a GM car. But I do want oil.
The only difference I see here (besides BP being profitable) is that BP is a foreign company. Just like the Scottish widows, American retirement funds have huge positions in BP. So if we bail it out then we won't have to bail out the US retirement funds. And if we don't bail out BP (or at least do something reasonable) then we will have to bailout the US retirement funds.
Make no mistake. Perhaps just a bit like Stalin demanding a arbitrary number of Nazis - say 100K - be hung after WWI, I think that we should have a few criminal trials when the dust settles. |
