About 45 minutes ago, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson held a news conference to announce the latest plan of the Bush administration to mitigate the U.S. and global financial crisis.
One of the elements of the plan is to buy stock in financial institutions from a broad array of institutions.
According to AP’s Martin Crutsinger, Paulson said “the government’s program would be designed to complement the efforts of banks to raise fresh capital from private sources…the government’s stock purchases would be of nonvoting shares so that the government will not have power to run the companies.
And,
The purchase of equity stakes in companies would be in addition to the main thrust of the $700 billion rescue effort, which involves purchasing distressed assets off the books of financial institutions as a way of unthawing frozen credit markets and getting banks to resume more normal lending operations
Let’s hope this, something, anything works.
CNN and MSNBC, and probably other networks, interrupted their regular programming for this breaking news. Fox News, in the middle of their Brit Hume panel discussion (Brit wasn’t there), didn’t “bat a TV eye,” nor mentioned a word about the news conference, but–after a commercial break–continued with an “ACORN” report (and alleged ties to Obama) throughout the entire time that Paulson was speaking to the nation, and to the world, about one of the worst financial crises we have ever faced.
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.