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To: CalculatedRisk who wrote (150789)	9/26/2008 12:38:18 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

The Dems support the paulson plan with more pork thrown on the taxpayer.

To: CalculatedRisk who wrote (150789)	9/26/2008 1:14:28 PM
From: GST	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

<So maybe if McCain and Obama explain their positions tonight that would help.> Why do I not see Obama on my TV with steam coming from his ears and his fist pounding the table saying 'no way in hell' to the Paulson plan?

To: CalculatedRisk who wrote (150789)	9/26/2008 1:54:33 PM
From: carranza2	Respond to of 306849

maybe if McCain and Obama explain their positions tonight that would help. Indeed. But first things first: How can can voters understand the candidates' positions if they don't understand why the bailout is necessary? In a manner designed to help voters understand what is going on in simple terms, I have composed the following which I invite both candidates to use. It is a polishing of a previous post, not spam: Imagine a couple of horse traders, A and B, who serially sell the same horse to each other except each sale is for $25 more than the previous one. They are both fat and happy and both are making money very nicely when it is their turn to sell. One day, the horse dies of old age and so does the trade and their livelihood. As a result, A’s and B’s debts, which became huge because their credit-worthiness improved as they profitably traded one horse among themselves, cannot be re-paid. They both go bankrupt. The folks who guaranteed A's and B's debts go bankrupt, too, because the trade between A and B seemed so good and so steady that they took their own silly positions based on the back and forth trading by A and B of the same horse. But these guarantors are themselves guaranteed by lots of others who decided to also make a buck off A’s and B’s trading of the same nag. Thus, there are multiple guarantors of a single horse being traded, all fat and happy, too, until it dies. They all go bankrupt in a big way because rather than take small positions on the commonsensical notion that, yes, some day the horse would indeed die, they decided to leverage their bets so as to make even more money on the one-horse trade between A and B. Thus, since leverage magnifies losses on the way down, the total losses caused by the death of one horse are enormous. In this way, the end of a one horse trade creates economic chaos for lots of people. In the meantime, other horse traders who imitated A and B’s trading 'acumen' are themselves guaranteed in the same way that A and B were. When a mysterious disease suddenly kills off many of the stock of living horses, the same thing happens except on a hugely magnified scale. Credit freezes up, banks go bankrupt. The government is asked to bail out horse traders and their guarantors. The horse trading market ends up in a huge pile of horse manure. A canny trader, Barren Wuffett, picks up the manure on the cheap, turns it into compost by simply letting it sit in a pile then makes millions selling recycled horse manure to farmers who can no longer afford fertilizer. All this happens over horses everyone but everyone knew were going to die some day