Rates should be improved…but so far, they’re not. They are not reacting predictable.

“It now looks like the National Debt will be over $10 Trillion tomorrow.

As of Sept 29th, the debt was $9,945,578,231,981.59

The surge in the National Debt over the last two weeks has been because of the Supplementary Financing Program (SFP) with the Treasury raising cash for the Fed’s liquidity initiatives (announced a couple of weeks ago).

Today the Treasury sold $45 billion in 15 day Cash Management Bills that are all for the Fed. Tomorrow the Treasury will sell $50 billion in 42 day bills also for the Fed. And that Wednesday auction should put the National Debt over the $10 Trillion mark (we will know on Thursday).

For good measure, the Treasury is also selling another $45 billion for the Fed on Thursday.

The good news is the borrowing rates are pretty low!

Even though this rapid increase in the debt is being driven by the Fed’s liquidity initiatives (and should be paid back), crossing $10 trillion will still be quite a milestone …”

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2008/09/national-debt-to-exceed-10-trillion.html

In other news I see the Senate will be voting on the rescue bill tomorrow evening.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/30/news/economy/bailout_tuesday/index.htm

I’m not familiar with the business models of those two real estate firms. Why would they need to borrow heavily?

She said that the proposed bill does nothing to help the current problem of home owner confidence in investing in housing, bt which I inferred she meant supporting existing housing prices.

She then switched to discussing HR3221.

http://www.raincityguide.com/2008/07/30/the-housing-rescue-bill/

She made it sound like it was just going into effect. In particular, she mentioned the part of the bill that allows lenders to modify the current mortgage by writing a new one at 90% of CURRENT appraised value, and have the bank share in any future equity increase for the amount that was “set aside”.

As it turns out, she was right. The bill prohibits any such modifications from occurring before October 1, 2008.

I had wondered if any had been done. Now I am wondering if any will be done, in light of the multitude of overlapping laws and regulations.

One of those re-priced early AM, after the dead-cat bounce of the market. More will likely follow with a reprice to the worse.

“Today was the day that the American people got off their knees, stood on their feet, looked their masters (bankers) in the eye and said, “You do not own me.” Today was a great day to be an American, as we demonstrated that we would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.”

Americans have always lived on their knees. Are you trying to say that the banks made people slaves? You think consumers are the victim? They did it to themselves! I find it fascinating that the very people who lived off what the banks provided are now biting the hands that feed them.