Warren Buffet has not convinced me...

He's a nice guy...he's been around a long time. He dropped 5 billion to stave off ...

"The surprise move by Mr Buffett, which was welcomed by some but was described as “worrying” by traders in Hong Kong and Tokyo, is understood to have derailed a big stakebuilding exercise by Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, the Japanese megabank.

The Japanese group was planning to invest around $2.5 billion in Goldman and would have become the third Tokyo giant to swoop on Wall Street within 48 hours"

Great! go Warren

My problem is the unknowns going into this deal....worthless paper is just that.....worthless.

I would assume that 700 billion is the discount price to a hot air value....what is the discount to the trash 15%, 10%, 5%......what is it?

"The first thing to understand is that a bailout plan doesn't have to cost anywhere close to $700 billion, so long as it's designed well. The $700 billion number that you see everywhere is an estimate of how much the government would spend to buy deteriorating assets now held by banks. Eventually, the government will turn around and sell these assets, for a price almost certain to be greater than zero. So this $700 billion is very different from $700 billion spent on, say, a war or on Medicare."

Congress needs to know what the original value is for each deal, where there is/was no transparency. There's too much fuzzy there.

IMO, the 700 billion is a fair amount of the original trash value....and we're going to pay a premium for trash.

doni