The $700 Billion Ripe-off!

[From CNN Transcrips; William Isaac, former FDIC Chairman, and Bob Barr]

CHETRY: Why aren't we hearing more people talk about that?
ISAAC: Well, a lot of people talk about it, but we can't -- our voices can't be heard from all the politicians saying
that Main Street is going to die. This bill is really for Main Street, not Wall Street. That's nonsense. This bill is for
Wall Street, and it offends me that we're going to take $700 billion of taxpayer funds and put it into Wall Street.
ISAAC:
the SEC needed to end the marking of mortgage- backed assets to fair value because, which is what their accounting rule requires because there is no market in mortgage-backed securities. And so, the SEC was just crushing the values of these by forcing them to be marked to an index and they destroyed. The SEC destroyed $500 billion (OFF-MIKE) financial industry needlessly. It should never have happened. And when you destroy $500 billion of (OFF-MIKE) lending capacity because banks lend $10 for every dollar of capital they have. So the SEC almost single-handedly destroyed $5 trillion of lending capacity. That's why we have a credit crunch in this country. Not because the banks need these bad loans purchased from them, they really don't. This is $700 billion out of $14 trillion financial system. There is plenty of liquidity in that system. What we have is a capital shortage because the SEC was destroying capital for the past year.

CHETRY: Why aren't we hearing more people talk about that?
ISAAC: Well, a lot of people talk about it, but we can't -- our voices can't be heard from all the politicians saying
that Main Street is going to die. This bill is really for Main Street, not Wall Street. That's nonsense. This bill is for
Wall Street, and it offends me that we're going to take $700 billion of taxpayer funds and put it into Wall Street.
---
BARR: No, I don't agree. The doom and gloom, the sky is falling that comes out of Washington is all a ploy by
the Washington insiders to force the country and force Congress into doing something without really thinking it
through. What they ought to be doing, instead of trying to push something through again almost sight unseen in
the Senate is have some extensive hearings to get to the bottom of this, have both sides, not just one side of the
argument presented to the American people. This is far too important, far too costly to be ramming something
through the throat, down the throats of the American citizenry.

BARR: This here again, there are some steps the government can take short of a $700 billion or trillion dollar.
The government doesn't even know what this is going to cost bailout. But certainly, there are some specific steps
that Washington could take short of that. They could direct the SEC to ease and change the artificial accounting
rules that have dried up credit, the mark to market accounting requirements.
The Fed could ease -- could put some -- could inject some liquidity into the market over the short term. That
would ease the credit crunch. So there are some specific steps that Washington could take, short of ramming this
trillion-dollar bailout.

The fix;
[From CNN Money]

The revised bailout bill also includes a "Mental Health Parity" provision, which would require health insurance companies to cover mental illness at parity with physical illness.

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