Trade the Cycles

Saturday, September 20, 2008

....."Congressional Leaders Stunned by Warnings"

"Congressional Leaders Stunned by Warnings," see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/washington/19cnd-cong.html. This is very scary stuff. A friend transferred his money out of WaMu (Washington Mutual) this week, and, an acquaintance at the health club owned some Freddie Mac and wanted advice recently. My main thing is market timing obviously, and, the guy who owned Freddie Mac had already been largely wiped out.

Part of the article:

"WASHINGTON — It was a room full of people who rarely hold their tongues. But as the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, laid out the potentially devastating ramifications of the financial crisis before congressional leaders on Thursday night, there was a stunned silence at first.

Mr. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had made an urgent and unusual evening visit to Capitol Hill, and they were gathered around a conference table in the offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“When you listened to him describe it you gulped," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

As Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, put it Friday morning on the ABC program “Good Morning America,” the congressional leaders were told “that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”

Mr. Schumer added, “History was sort of hanging over it, like this was a moment.”


When Mr. Schumer described the meeting as “somber,” Mr. Dodd cut in. “Somber doesn’t begin to justify the words,” he said. “We have never heard language like this.”

“What you heard last evening,” he added, “is one of those rare moments, certainly rare in my experience here, is Democrats and Republicans deciding we need to work together quickly.”

Although Mr. Schumer, Mr. Dodd and other participants declined to repeat precisely what they were told by Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson, they said the two men described the financial system as effectively bound in a knot that was being pulled tighter and tighter by the day."

.......http://www.JoeFRocks.com/

Labels: , , , , , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home