Fed to Buy Massive Amounts of Short-Term Debt

Today's news confirms what many have said all along--that the massive $700 billion bailout plan is not nearly enough to resolve the huge problem. In fact, when asked how he came up with the figure of $700 billion, he replied that it represented 5% of the bad debt load.

5%??? If that is just 5%, then $700 billion will only resolve 1/20 of the problem!

So now the latest news is that the Fed is going to begin buying "massive amounts of short-term debt," over and beyond the $700 billion already earmarked for the bailout. Simply put, this means the government will go another trillion-+ dollars into debt to buy the bad loans will cannot and will not be paid to the banks. So obviously, it won't get paid back to the government either.

The private who own the "independent" Fed will simply loan the government more money AT INTEREST, increasing the national debt another trillion dollars. This, along with the $700 billion bailout and the $5.6 trillion liability for nationalizing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae a month ago, means that the national debt has now gone up about $7 trillion in just one month alone.

A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon we're talking about real money.

http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/bbdp/fed-to-buy-massive-amounts-of-short-term/200444?cid=5

The article reads in part:

There is growing pressure for the U.S. government to do more beyond the $700 billion financial bailout package President Bush signed into law Friday.

To that end, the Fed invoked Depression-era emergency powers to begin buying commercial paper — short-term funding that many companies rely on to pay their workers and buy supplies.

The government's bailout package is aimed at thawing lending by buying rotten mortgages and other bad debts from banks and other financial institutions. By getting these bad debts off bank's balance sheets, they might be in a better position to raise capital and more willing to lend to each other and to customers.

 

Tight credit has made it increasingly difficult and expensive for companies to raise money to fund their operations.

 

"The expansion of Federal Reserve lending is helping financial firms cope with reduced access to their usual sources of funding," Bernanke explained.