PBS’s The News Hour had a fascinating story yesterday about how the financial calamity is threatening dozens of transit agencies around the country with extreme financial problems.
The short version is that, with the blessing and encouragement of the federal government, many agencies engaged in what are called “buy-leaseback” arrangements with banks. Since public agencies can’t depreciate purchases of say, rail cars, since public agencies don’t pay taxes, they would sell them to banks. The banks would then get the tax shelter, while the agencies got extra funds, part of which were used to lease the rails cars or whatever from the banks.
But guess what? They needed insurance to do these kinds of deals. And who was the main insurer? None other than global behemoth AIG, and since their ratings are in the toilet, a lot of transit agencies are considered to be in “technical default” on these deals. These kinds of deals eventually were outlawed, but lots of them are still coming due around the country.
Pretty cool how neo-liberals worked things, huh? They insisted the public sector be starved of funds, then they found a way to profit from it by using the tax code and financial shenanigans, and now some of the transit agencies may fail (or at the very least be forced to massively defer maintenance and capital investment,) which will “prove” once again that the public sector is wasteful.
It’s a very funny tale to tell over cocktails for some Banksters. Not so fun for a physically challenged worker in D.C. who depends on transit to get to work, as portrayed in the PBS story.
Damn, I think these people wrecked everything. You kind of expect to go outside every morning and find a banker and a Congress-critter loosening the lug nuts on your wheels.
Oooops!
http://politicalwire.com/archi....._vote.html
What do you think of that corrupt, ugly party of yours now Stupes?
Here’s a hilarious insight into right wing thinking on the stock market:
http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=12142
It makes as much sense as any troll bleatings you’ll read here.
YLB–
You are poor because you do not have the ability to look ahead…like the market does.
When it was apparent Obama was going to win in October, the DOW was at 11,000.
Since then, it has tanked.
Why?
Because the market has NO CONFIDENCE in Obama and all his talk about taxing the wealthy more and bigger government spending which is certain to lead to hyper=-inflation in the long-run.
YLB, you are a LEFTIST PINHEADED KLOWN.
I don’t expect you to understand any of this.
Hence, you will remain poor….despite all the “free stuff” you believe Obama will shove your way.
3 The market doesn’t “look”. It hallucinates.
Actually, way back when Jerry Sanders was still running Advanced Micro Devices, some of us techno types discovered that the state of his upper lip was as good a predictor as anything else of coming trends, at least in high tech. If the latest photo of him in the San Jose Mercury-News or some trade rag showed a big, bushy handlebar mustache, it meant AMD was prosperous and hiring and that the whole sector was in for a run of good times. If he had it neatly trimmed, things were probably slowing down. If he shaved the thing off, you knew that the layoffs at AMD and the other chipmakers were coming thick and fast, and that their share prices were likely to plummet and drag the rest of the market into the muck along with them.
Conservatism is nothing more than a sophisticated scheme to take money from your pocket and put it in their pockets, coupled with political slavery.
@1 So much for the GOP’s token African-American leader. Hey, they let an AA be party leader for a few days, now it’s back to business-as-usual.
Calling puttybutt! Calling puttybutt! The GOP just shit on your race! Will you still be a Republican after this? Yeah, I think so, you seem like a gullible stooge.
@3 Now isn’t that just like the rich-white-guys-who-own-most-of-the-stocks to cut off their own wallets to spite Obama!
@9 Self-immolation is one of the few things that Republicans are good at.
The rich always have a fit when they think they are not going get what they want. But, ultimately, they have to do something with the money. Every time there is a tax increase they peevishly hang on to their shekels for a while, but they’ll invest again. Just don’t cave.
There is still massive foreign investment in U.S. bonds.
Fuck the stock market. That’s like judging the nation’s economic wellbeing by whether things are going good in Vegas.
I heard Timothy Geithner waxing philosophical on Charlie Rose. He said whaT to me sounded like a deliberate misrepresentation of the truth.
What he sid was that the reason for our economic woes is that the regulatory system was created decades ago and no longer relates to the current situation. That makes it sound as if as bunch of ‘old fogey’ rules have been holding the financial system back.
These rules have not been enforced for thirty years, and what we havee now is the result.
I don’t like this sort of deliberate dis information foisted on U.S. citizens by dishonest government officials who know better.
We better keep an eye on this miserable bastard.
@2
ylb ,
get you life savings of $20.00 under you mattress and go for it you have the plan.
LMAO!