Is the US Bailout just the next Financial Scam?

Its been quite interesting watching the evolution of all the financial market news on the New Media, and the most fascinating has been the proposed $700bn bailout of the banks by the US Treasury (or more accurately the US Taxpayer).

When news came through about the bailout the financial community went berserk, and stock prices jumped globally (not surprising, as this essentially saved a lot of of well dressed *rses). The blogosphere also started off with its own growth (see below).



What has been possibly more interesting is watching the change in the meme, however - the initial euphoria was originally driven by the financial industry itself (no surprise there, as it essentially guaranteed the bonusses, mansions and pensions of those that were still standing).

However, it didn't take that long before the blogosphere and social media sphere to start to comment that this may be just another bill of goods sold by the financial industry, and this sentiment has been growing over the weekend, as the chart below shows:



Now I'll be the first to admit this is a simplistic analysis, and its seems the "good idea" meme is still growing - but just reading the tone of comments on for example the term ("bailout" on Summize) , its all very negative. (In fact one of the lessons of this analysis is just how hard it is to get a view of the sentiment around a meme)

The main Tech community is still largely free of all this, Techmeme being full of the usual shiny new stuff conversation, (and the main blogsites like digg and memeorandum are still mainly split between sport and politics) but this "hold on a bit" sentiment is growing not just on Twitter, but on the blogs stoo - in the Tech blogging space it has been expressed by Dave Winer, who is typically an early bird with new memes:

Now we have another impressive Almost Presidential secretary, Henry Paulson, who says there's impending doom, but he can't say exactly what it is, it's not security this time, but fear of starting another level of bank runs. Senators and Representatives come out of a Thursday night meeting with the secretary (would they have believed the President) won't say exactly what he said, but they are stunned. The next day buried in a sea of press about this event is an almost innocuous paragraph in a NYT piece that talks about a flight to safety from the US Treasury money market. OMG. A point made by the secretary to the Congresspeople, a lot of your constituents have their savings in money markets. The Senators think to themselves, Fuck the constituents, that's where my retirement savings are! (And by the way, mine.)

Although not living the US, I would say that anybody who approves a $700bn+ package that essentially (as I understand it, details are still fairly scarce - which is another problem ) pardons the guys who got them into this mess (I don't think they even lose their bonusses, never mind jobs) and penalises those who will sort them out, and passes the whole shebang into law in a few days before its been fully articulated and debated is probably not learning the lessons of the past. I think that creates the danger of being fleeced, but Dave thinks the Great US Public won't be fooled again.

Having been fooled once, sure there are some among us who will be fooled again, but we will not all be fooled again, as evidenced by the posts on all kinds of blogs.

I'm not so sure. You may not be able to fool all the people all the time, but you only have to fool enough people for long enough to enact any act into law. The interesting question to me now is whether the New Media can act as a way of focussing the opposition to this deal and proposing alternatives against a lot of vested (and we mean vested - its their shares in these companies) interests no doubt pushing their views very hard.