House of representatives have just rejected the bill

95 Dems.  voted against it too.  It must have been a bad bill if Pelosi couldn't get her own party in line.

Quote Originally Posted by VGPOP:

Warren Buffett said if this bill doesn't pass, United States will suffer the biggest financial meltdown in American history.

I take this guy seriously when he talks about finance.

USA is fucked.

we're fucked because the obamas and mccains and bushes of the world are the decision makers and base their decisions on ignorance and pandering while enough attention isn't paid to someone like buffett who wrote this over 5 years ago:

“Charlie and I are of one mind in how we feel about derivatives and the trading activities that go with them: We view them as time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system.”

“In recent years, some huge-scale frauds and near-frauds have been facilitated by derivatives trades. In the energy and electric utility sectors, for example, companies used derivatives and trading activities to report great “earnings” – until the roof fell in when they actually tried to convert the derivatives-related receivables on their balance sheets into cash. “Mark-to-market” then turned out to be truly “mark-to-myth.””

“Another problem about derivatives is that they can exacerbate trouble that a corporation has run into for completely unrelated reasons. This pile-on effect occurs because many derivatives contracts require that a company suffering a credit downgrade immediately supply collateral to counterparties. Imagine, then, that a company is downgraded because of general adversity and that its derivatives instantly kick in with their requirement, imposing an unexpected and enormous demand for cash collateral on the company. The need to meet this demand can then throw the company into a liquidity crisis that may, in some cases, trigger still more downgrades. It all becomes a spiral that can lead to a corporate meltdown.”

“Charlie and I believe, however, that the macro picture is dangerous and getting more so. Large amounts of risk, particularly credit risk, have become concentrated in the hands of relatively few derivatives dealers, who in addition trade extensively with one other. The troubles of one could quickly infect the others. On top of that, these dealers are owed huge amounts by non-dealer counterparties. Some of these counterparties, as I’ve mentioned, are linked in ways that could cause them to contemporaneously run into a problem because of a single event (such as the implosion of the telecom industry or the precipitous decline in the value of merchant power projects). Linkage, when it suddenly surfaces, can trigger serious systemic problems.”

“In our view, however, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.”

Bad for McCain   [Ramesh Ponnuru] National Review

Not that it's the most important fallout, but this vote is very bad for McCain. He was trying to get House Republicans on board, after all, and he failed. Blaming the Democrats for the failure will not and should not work, given the ratios on both sides.

But several conservatives voted for the bill, including Blunt, Boehner, Camp, Cantor, Kline, Lungren, McCrery, Putnam, (Paul) Ryan, Tancredo, Weldon, (Joe) Wilson. I think they made the right call.