So the government continues down the rock slope of buying up, insuring and loaning out billions of dollars of money they do not have to buy assets , equities , loans , etc, that really never had any value. As the market began to crash, these off the book assets became impossible to move. When an asset can not be sold it has to be written off. You know where  it went from here.

     What are the results, the governement is now the Warrent Buffet of the world, owning a huge insurance company, AIG, the two largest US mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Feddie Mac, and soon a company that will own all the bad debt that got us in to this mess. And forget about tender offers, they can print their own money.  I support a free market and business, but it blows my mind that our accounting laws and SEC oversight are so loose that companies were permitted to keep these mammoth assets off their books. If companies were forced to keep these investments on the balance sheets, and also have them limited to by cash and tangible assets this would never have happened.

    So where does that leave people like you and I ? I do not know about you but it leaves me nervous and waiting to see what things look like when the dusts settles. However , reading the article below I have to agree that you will see inflation and higher interest rates. So if you want to get ahead of the game, start cutting back spending and saving up some extra cash.

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Biggest Bailout Ever: Did the Government Go Too Far?
Posted Sep 19, 2008 10:39am EDT by Henry Blodget in Newsmakers, Recession, Banking

After a few weeks of trying to stand tough in the face of demands for a wholesale rescue, Hank Paulson apparently couldn’t take it anymore. So now we’ll have the biggest bailout in history, including:

A huge RTC-like government garbage can that banks can throw all their toxic balance-sheet waste into. (This time, the transfer will be made before they go bankrupt, unlike the case with the first RTC -a.k.a. the Resolution Trust Corp., a government agency created in the late 1980s to liquidate the assets of failed Savings & Loans)
A temporary ban on shortselling. (With the unfortunate implication that shorts are the cause of all this)
A federal guarantee on money-market accounts. (Including non-recourse loans to banks to buy high-quality commercial paper and meet money-market obligations.)
Not surprisingly, the market’s up huge on this news. The moves should head off a run on money-market funds, restore liquidity to the financial system, and, as bank analyst Tom Brown puts it in the accompanying video, create a general “time out” for the panic to recede.

1 – So what are the costs? Almost certainly:
2 – Higher taxes
3 – Higher interest rates on government debt
4 – Bigger government deficits

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