Bailout Update
CNN-Money has a PDF of a Draft House version of the bill, but Paul Krugman notes that House staffers are saying that a number of changes were made to the draft.
They have posted the real bill at a House web site, but they are apparently using “a Kaypro with a Z80 chip running at 4 Mhz using CP/M for the operating system and a Bell 103 modem”¹ because I haven’t gotten a connection after a couple of hours of trying. I guess it would have been too much to expect them to upload a copy to someone with the server capacity to actually make it available.
They probably didn’t understand how many people throughout the whole financial network around the world would like a look at this turkey before tomorrow’s markets open.
I still don’t understand how what they are talking about doing is going to convince the people with money that the people who are holding this manure are going to be more worthy of trust after they dump it in the Septic Bank™.
The UK nationalized those that failed, sold off what they could and are holding the mortgages to term. That I understand. The Swedes did pretty much the same thing by nationalizing banks and then selling them back to the private sector when conditions improved and the bad mortgages got sorted out. I don’t understand what buying the bonds and derivatives does, other than bailing out Wall Street for bad decisions. If they want to inject capital, do what Warren Buffet did, buy preferred stock at a negotiated rate.
1. Not a bad system – for the early 1980s.
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you got a link to that real bill? all i can find is dozens of copies of the discussion draft.
That must be the bill, because I finally got into the Financial Services site and that’s the same PDF of the discussion draft as I was looking at from CNN, including the same document name “ayo08c04”.
They are still messing with it and made the announcement to calm the markets. That’s all I can figure out.
‘made the announcement to calm the markets’ was my guess too.
Hey! What’s wrong with the Kaypro? I Had one of those first portables… OK… luggables. Was better than the Osbourne! LOL Worked fine for me… in it’s day… long ago… Ahem. 😉
And who said they want anyone to get their hands on the bill anyway? 😉
They shoulda been running MP/M. With 8″ floppies and a 5 megabyte hard drive. Ran an entire accounting system off of one of those big daddies. S-100 bus and all, with 5 terminals.
As for getting their hands on the bill, wasn’t that Monica Lewinsky, and it wasn’t exactly hands? 😉
Using dBASE II, Wordstar, etc. on a SWTP S-100 with Wyse terminals – good system, and stable.
Actually, Kryten, the factory was just down the road from me in San Diego, and I saw a lot of prototypes that never made it out the door. Good technical people who obviously cut their teeth on test equipment.