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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: slacker711 who wrote (112109)	5/29/2009 1:18:21 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541735

Would anybody be making these nonsense arguments if private equity had stepped up in December? Would we be saying that Blackstone should get preferential treatment because they lent money when nobody else would? My second point is that it is ridiculous to now call these loans charity. They were meant to be paid back with interest. Did anyone believe that it was at all probable that these loans would actually be paid back without further strong govt intervention? If it was probable, then private equity would have stepped up and done the deal. But if a private loan was priced in accordance with the probability of payback, the terms would have been so onerous that it would have guaranteed that the company would have failed; hence no one did it. This is a rare economic environment. At least, we all hope that it is rare, not to be repeated in our or in our children's lifetimes, and hopefully longer than that. It calls for abnormal responses. Unhappily, there are no maps for it.