Bear Stearns. You gotta like an investment company with the word “bear” in it. If you are the kind of investor to go bullish over anything big, Bear, Stearns & Co., Inc., was BIG. For years its subprime mortgage biz made investors go all squirmy with bullishness.
They could pretend that the word “bear” was there for irony.
Call it prophecy, instead: The Bear Stearns bull lies on the ground, gored. Time to sell off the carcass.
The Federal Reserve has forced through a takeover deal, with J.P. Morgan buying out the dead bull. At a low, low price — though not nearly as low had the Federal Reserve stayed out. It’s another so-called capitalist bailout, an attempt to make a failure not seem so big.
This is not free-market capitalism, folks. This is big business welfare-statism.
In their normal run of operation, businesses negotiate the uncertainties of markets using tools like the profit-and-loss statement, aiming for profit. When they don’t manage this, they fail. Remember that term, loss?
Well, in today’s truly bipartisan political economy, the bigger you are the more scared our rulers get when you fail. So they prop up, as best they can, the biggest failures.
Forget welfare queens. The welfare kings are businessmen on the take from government. The losers are everybody else, as idiotic risks and bad business practices get propped up by government.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.