A Thank You Note From Wall Street

Dear President Bush and Secretary Paulson et all:
On behalf of all of us here on Wall Street and corporate boardrooms around this great nation, we would like to express our profound appreciation for bailing out our sorry behinds. Only in today’s America can a republican president and his flunkies at Treasury and the Fed elect to reward years of fiscal mismanagement, greed and poor decision making with a financial mulligan. In one fell swoop you have made obsolete the notion the function of the capital markets is to set the price for success and failure.
What makes this federal bailout so fabulous and brilliant is who gets to pick up the tab for our malfeasance…the taxpayer. Think about it for a moment. We encourage people to take out mortgages on houses they can’t afford and home equity loans they can’t pay back. We then toss in a few wrinkles like adjustable rate mortgages just to get everybody at the craps table and then sit back and wait for the bomb to go off.
The only thing we hadn’t really planned on was the sheer amount of bad paper we’d put out there. But even there we thought we had it covered by packaging this junk up and selling it to the public. Sure, we figured somebody would end up with the black Queen, we just didn’t know everyone would. But then those years of generously donating our hard earned money to you, my president, paid off. Just as we were tied to the railroad tracks along came Hank and Ben Bernanke to save us. The fact we’d tied ourselves to the tracks was of little concern to you. Making the world safe for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs shareholders won the day and we thank you for it.
But your prescient plan didn’t end there. You sent Secretary Paulson and Fed Chief Ben Bernanke up to see Nancy Pelosi and Christopher Dodd because you knew you needed them to get this proposal through Congress. Pointing out democrats couldn’t be seen as complicit in putting the great unwashed out on the street during an election year guaranteed they’d get on board. Even Chuck Schumer was dancing to your tune.
The beloved taxpayer is now on the hook for a cool trillion or two and the stock market is smoking. Speaking of the beloved taxpayer, a few of us here at Metropolitan Club are actually raising our glasses to that great American sage, Leona Helmsley, who once said” Only the little people pay taxes.” Pay indeed my friends. The little people will be paying for this debacle until we melt that stupid polar ice cap.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t also compliment you on the short term ban on shorting financial stocks. It’s the financial equivalent of the wage and prices controls Nixon imposed in the early 70’s to curb inflation. Hey, we know it was a long term disaster but who’s thinking long term here? You’ve just given us enough breathing room to unload these dogs at higher prices. Let Obama and his financial geniuses worry about it next year.
We know you’re too modest to talk about the political implications of all this but we all know what you were thinking. Bailing out Wall Street to save Main Street (wink, wink) keeps republicans in the game and forces Obama to get behind your plan. We’re so proud we gave so much money to your campaign, Mr. President. It sure paid off.