Legacy, Schmegacy
U.S. Lays Out Plan to Buy Up to $1 Trillion in Risky Assets By BRIAN KNOWLTON and EDMUND L. ANDREWS
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration formally presented the latest step in its financial rescue package on Monday, an attempt to draw private investors into partnership with a new federal entity that could eventually buy up to $1 trillion in troubled assets that are weighing down banks and clogging up the credit markets.
. . . Initially, a new Public-Private Investment Program will provide financing for $500 billion in purchasing power to buy those troubled or toxic assets — which the government refers to more diplomatically as legacy assets — with the potential of expanding later to as much as $1 trillion, according to a fact sheet issued by the Treasury Department.
--read entire article-- ____________________________________________________Scurrilously designed and fraudulently sold investment vehicles (they call them that because they drive off with your money) are liabilities that threaten the nations of the world economically. We're tossing a $trillion at them, mostly engineered by AIG and yet there are $40-60 trillion of these obligations out there. What of them? How does a single dollar defend forty to sixty dollars.
Answer: it doesn't. What it does is make some people well at the expense of others and who lines up at the Federal trough will show who are black sheep and who are white. Insiders are going to get bailed out. The rest of us are destined to throw water over the side of the boat for generations yet to come.
What really smokes my shorts is the creeping language of this outrage. Language interests me. It is the early tool of the left, the right and those who would work their Orwellian ways with the federal money-pump.
These toxic liabilities were (in Warren Buffet's very recent words) "financial weapons of mass destruction." They have since become; toxic assets (although no one will buy them) and by decree of Tim Geitner have morphed into legacy assets.
The man may not have had time to consult a dictionary. The definitions are several: as a noun, take your pick of
1. bequest made in will: money or property that is left to somebody in a will--nah, he couldn't have possibly meant that. A bequeath to the already wealthy?
2. something from past: something that is handed down or remains from a previous generation or time--possible, but no one in their right mind would want to connect this fraud with the ghost of Frauds Past.
3. As an adjective it means something outdated or discontinued, as a legacy currency. Yeah, that's exactly the example given. Did Tim mean to forewarn that our currency was about to become outdated or discontinued?
Wow. The power of language. And we thought we'd lost it.