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Originally Posted by birdshine
I hate to say it but this is kind of a moot point because no one wants to buy up these companies. These toxic assets and credit swaps are total trash they have negative values they're completely unusable. When these companies fail, no one benefits. No one gets goods for cheap and turns it around, no one picks up valuable assets, it just leaves a giant hole in the economy where there used to be money spent and it scares everyone it doesn't touch because its happened to people they thought would never fail so they dont think anyone can pay them back. This government is buying up these toxic assets so the companies can exist to pay off their debts. Hell, we let Lehman Brothers fall and it was a huge catastrphy. It immediately killed AIG and other business. No one wanted to buy their crappy "assets" so the government ended up giving them 2 dollars a share. The problem is these people fucked up so bad there is no way of profiting on it, only minimizing the damage. The Free Market could not possibly heal this wound without us entering another depression.
The Government isnt going to continue to run these business forever giving them the edge over competition they're going to hold on to these shares until theyre worth something again and then sell them back to the private sector.
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Lehman Brothers made their own grave. First by handing out so many subprime loans, then when those loans started to bite them in the ass they chose NOT to sell of portions of their company. Lehman Brothers were made offers from different companies all over the world for portions of their company but they chose not to sell or in some cases stalled so long that the offers were retracted. Then when in the face of bankruptcy it was suggested to them that they cut back on the multi-million dollar bonuses they were paying to their executives, they opted not to do this and effectively drove the nails into their own coffin. After Lehman Brothers filled for bankruptcy people lost confidence in similar companies, as they should, and AIG stock went down. In the world of capitalism you take risks and you find yourself with either a gain or a loss. They tried to manipulate the system and lost. You cant start crying when things dont go your way. Now... AIG got a bailout, why not Lehman Brothers? Do we just not care that much about them? Do we just not have the money to bail them out? Or do we just not want to? What makes AIG so special that they get a hand out for the same bad business practices?