What was the best alternative to the Banking Bailout?
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Conservatives say that it was a bad idea and cite the deficit and I am just wondering what was their alternative. How did the intend to get banks lending again (responsibly).
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jim s said:
Let them fail.
Enter …
The Bank of Jim
(Moose, Rocco, help the Judge find his checkbook.)September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
Mr.Cow said:
The banks should have,and could have been told 2 years before the crash that they need to refinance these Variable interest loans that were floating around out there.Last month the number of foreclosures again went up so this whole system is probably going to start all over again. Are we then going to pour more money back into the banks who are going to loose more money? Even if the government would pay the refinance closing costs it would have saved 100’s of billions of dollars.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
Adam S said:
Really, really big mattresses.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
What Is to Be Done? said:
The alternative is lock every one of those greedy bastards up.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
tv drug said:
Well, the bailout wasn’t necessarily a "bad Idea" although I certainly do not agree with it. But, giving the bail out money to corporations that were complete failures was unwise. If one advocates "bail outs" it would have been wiser to have "invested" in corporations that were not failures, giving them enough money to buy out the failing corps, and turn them into fruitful corps.
I usually get into corruption. I just don’t feel like it right now. Figure it out, it should be obvious.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
beach heaven said:
Well it would have been one thing if we had just bailed out U.S. banks, but the banks were from all over the world. Amazing they’ve already been able to pay their employees, very high bonuses
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
Rico said:
Let the bad ones fail, and the economy sink into Depression #2. They believe in the natural order of things, let the chips fall where they may.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
UNITED PLANKTON AGAINST OBAMA said:
let them go bankrupt…they take our money,throw it out a window,tell us its our fault,then they take more…
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
Welfare Pimps! said:
Here’s an idea!!! Let em fail and let a responsible lending institution step in an pick up the slack!!!!
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
Chewy Ivan said:
The alternative was to let the market run its course while Americans suffered through another full-blown economic depression.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
The Zeitgeist said:
I’m not a conservative, but my alternative would be to let them fail.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
Big Brodie said:
These bankers were the Conservatives’ peeps. These scoundrels were their people. Now as their 401Ks recover I think you’ll find that they are backing away from the argument that the banks should of been allowed to collapse.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
ktheintz said:
Nationalizing the banks would probably have been a better plan than bailing them out–not forcibly of course, just buying them, managing them until the storm was over, then selling them back to the private sector. But conservatives like that idea even less than bailing them out.
What people forget is that we tried it their way initially, by letting Lehman Brothers fail, and the whole banking system was on the brink of collapse as a result.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
Zero1 said:
Let bad business people go out of business. There is no guarantee of a taxpayer funded bailout to any business in the United States Constitution.
Let the good banks buy out the failed banks and everything will go on just fine. The people who lost their jobs would be rehired by the new bank owners.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
Rick said:
I’ve actually heard a few right-wingers say that not bailing out the banks may well have led us into a depression but that would be better than bailing out failing businesses!
"Sure … 40 or 50 million people may have lost their jobs but if that’s what is necessary to stick to our capitalistic principles, so be it."
Of course, none of them would have starved. In fact, they would have bought up real estate and stocks for pennies on the dollar and been richer than ever ten years from now when the economy came back.
That’s right-wingers for you though. "Damn everyone else … I want the biggest share of the pie that I can get!"
They’re sick, in other words!
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
Sarah said:
Let them fail!
Why is that option (you know, the free market option) totally scorned by the proponents of the bank bailout? Yeah it would’ve sucked for some, but we wouldn’t have put the next generation into serious debt, plus the banks that acted responsibly in the first place would’ve gotten the business that the failing banks lost. The responsible banks would have been able to lend without any glitches, like BB&T, the bank whose motto now is ‘Still Strong, Still Lending’.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
DAR said:
Did you notice that after we paid the money to bail out GM it went bankrupt anyhow, so the money was for nothing? It failed, about 2 months ago, went through reorginazation problematic only because DUE TO the bailout government got involved and shafted pension fund bond holders to pay unsecured union debt, which is not what the legal rights are. However, it reorganized and is back in business. The angst over it took longer than the restructuring.
The same should have happened to banks. We paid AIG, AIG paid Goldman Sachs 100 cents on the dollar (as well as many foreign investers, the money did NOT stay here). Goldman Sachs has a revolving door of personel to the Federal Reserve and US Govt, in fact, Paulson came from there and had I understand tons of stock from stock options.
Rolling Stone (a well known right wing rag) calls Goldman Sachs "a Vampire Squid Wrapped Around the Face of Humanity."
I find that poetic.
Regardless, they should have failed, it was their bad investment, not ours, there would have been a sharp contraction and everyone would be going back to work by now. Instead the huge debt was put onto the struggling economy and the bubble is still ‘out there’.
The $23 TRILLION the independent Tarp inspector says the Federal Reserve injected or guaranteed in obligations but won’t say where they went is also problematic, obviously. The Federal Reserve, facing a push to audit them and see where all our money is going, now is trumpeting that it has headed off a depression (instead of caused the recession) and that we are seeing in the market is ‘green shoots’, not, say, ‘rich thieves’.
The market rally started when Goldman Sachs posted unexpected profits. Also I have read that through consolidation through the bank takeovers Goldman Sachs is now big enough to cause 50 percent of trades on any given day. The NYSE just repealed a rule that would have made them report how they are using this market power.
Demand an audit of the Federal Reserve, the one set out in HR 1207 and S 604. The Fed has hired enron’s lobbiest to prevent this and to get some ‘transparency’ provision with no teeth, like no looking at how they set monetary policies. They say they need to be independent or the world will be worried.
The world? How about us?
I’m worried now.
There is spending, and then there is looting.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
mick t said:
End the Fed.
Most of these answers seem to be operating on the mistaken belief that this recession happened by accident. The banks cause all the problems, specifically the central bank. Everyone knows the first depression was caused by the Federal Reserve in order to consolidate wealth in fewer hands. They’re doing it again, and they’re getting away with it again. People should be rioting in the streets demanding an end to the Fed. The people are being fleeced, having their homes taken from them, and our elected dictators decided to reward the people responsible for causing the problem. It’s sick. They can get away with it, because their friends who own all the media companies can’t afford to say anything too terribly bad about them. The whole economic system is subject to the will of these oligarchs at the Fed, and it needs to stop NOW. They already own most of the country, and now they want to take our liberty. The spirit of ‘76 better rise or America is in for a long reign of tyranny.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
davidmgorman said:
to repeal the grahm leech bliley act, which repealed glast steagal
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
martinmagini said:
let them fail as a result of their poor management, just like anyone else would.
instead give the money to each adult american citizen. then maybe the banks wouldn’t have failed because people could have paid their mortgages.September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm -
Tiziano said:
The alternative is to deal with the origin of the problem.
Relinquishing arbitrary control of interest rates by the central bank back to the free market where they very quickly respond to reckless lending and completely decentralising control of the money supply. The problem started with the Federal Reserve and spread throughout the global financial markets, they flooded the banking system with excess credit for a decade which which engineered the huge indebtedness and malinvestment. This is compounded by the problem of fiat money (permits fractional reserve banking) which means every bank is technically insolvent and central banks can print at will and make the population pay by debasing the currency and the eventual inflation that ensues. We need commodity money whether it be a gold or a basket of valuable metals that substantiate money and thus hold stable, reliable intrinsic value which cannot be created out of thin air.
The banking behaviour is the symptom NOT the underlying cause. They talk about bonuses in the news, it’s a complete red herring to distract the public. When the problem arose, the only answer is to revamp and let the banks go down. The damage had already been done, it is/was irreversible, no amount of money inflation or bail outs is constructive to the macro economy. Everyone is poorer for that.
September 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
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