Actually, one argument for this movie is that George Bailey is a liberal. All Potter is doing is giving loans to people who earned them thru good credit and consistent employment. Bailey gives loans to people with questionable credit and ability to pay them back. Hence, Bailey is broke.
Potters way is If they don’t pay, they lose their house within the time allowed by law. Potter keeps Baileys money that his uncle misplaced, but otherwise is a law abiding business owner.
A good lesson in this movie for liberals is that George Bailey practices what he preaches and isn’t a hypocrite.
Indeed, Potter is a competent businessman who profits by giving customers what they want, affordable rental housing, a hot commodity during the acute housing shortage in the years that followed WWII.
Yes, Potter was wrong to keep the wad of cash that George Bailey's woefully incompetent uncle inadvertently handed him. But perhaps Potter, a stockholer in the Baileys' enterprise, saw this as payback for the losses he had incurred as a result of the Baileys' bad business practices such as running a do-gooder sub-prime loan scheme designed to make "everyone a homeowner."
Eye-opening view on the movie that’s new to me. Thank you!
Bailey was doing what Democrats did with the Community Reinvestment Act, and community organizers then shamed banks with. But, credit can not be safely extended on any basis other than risk, and risk can not be mitigated through social engineering. So, we got the sub-prime mortgage crisis and then the, what, $700 billion bailout?
What Bailey did was fine as a private enterprise effectively providing charity. But, any loss would be and should be the enterprise’s alone.