Hi all. Before you get too outraged about all these government bailouts, its interesting to get an education on the Federal Reserve, Treasury, etc, etc. The News Hour on PBS did an excellent overview take a look:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june09/solman_03-17.html
The bottom line is the Fed can create billions in assets electronically with the press of a button. The Federal Reserve is not the same as the Treasury which actually has to fund the government. In the past 12 months the Federal Reserve has injected over 1 trillion into the banking system and they are going to now insert money into Treasury with their plans to buy government debt.
Its kind of perverse that the Fed can create money out of nothing to buy government debt to finance the government's over-spending. Talk about a giant ponzi scheme!
The net result of too many dollars in the system is a decline in the dollar and hyper-inflation. We saw the dollar start to crack yesterday with more declines to come. Gold also had a huge rally as a result. Dr cthruu did a post on the dollar breakdown yesterday as well as the gold breakout.
If you don't have any hard assets in your portfolio, get some. I consider real estate to be a hard asset.
Let me know any comments and good trading all.