Blogosphere comments on Paulson

I'm generally in support of the Paulson/Bush/Bernanke bailout, though I think attempts to "bail out homeowners" are ill-advised, since it would simply cost 10x as much to do this as to make the banking system get back on life support again.

But, I've been discovering a growing sentiment of housing bubble bloggers who think badly of the Paulson plan, and some of them even say it pretty eloquently.

golfer_X at Riverside/San Bernardino's blog (which I just discovered) observes that economic weakness and uncertainty will likely make the housing crash worse, which will make the economic downturn worse, which...

With all this hitting the news every night I have to wonder, who is still looking to buy a house? I was planning on seriously looking in early 09. Prices in my target areas are starting to hit the "magic number" that I had set 2 years ago. But now I have more to think about. If this continues, are our jobs safe?

Undoubtedly this will make a lot of buyers think twice before buying a home.

He also makes another post here:

The more and more I read about this bailout the more I am convinced our so called "leaders" haven't a clue. The latest is Bernanke's comments that the government should buy all that toxic waste at a price close to the "hold till maturity value". So instead of buying this crap at market values they are proposing to buy it basically at full price or what would have been full price had the market not imploded. There reasoning is that the prices we are currently seeing are "fire sale" prices and they don't reflect the "actual value". Are they freaking kidding me?? They really believe those 700 sq/ft shacks in Compton are worth $500k. This is beyond insane.

News Flash Mr Bernanke, the current fire sale prices are still more than most of this stuff is worth! They are attempting to keep homes unaffordable in the mistaken beleif that they really are worth that much. Even though very few people could afford them under normal underwriting standards.

Ben Jones, commenting on his post at The Housing Bubble Blog, says this about the bailout:

In the spring of 2005, I used to study the monthly summary that Fannie Mae put out and write up an analysis. I doubt anybody read those. But this is the thing I don’t understand; $700 billion probably wouldn’t even save that one company, much less both GSEs, AIG, Wall Street, etc. And Washington would likely blow half of that staffing up and buying desks.

Some scary stuff getting discussed about how far you can stretch $700B, much less $250B or $350B.