[VictoryGal]

Wow. The socialists are universally making their big move.

And both the Dims and the GOP are in the tank with them. We’ve been sold.

[Batrachian]

"you would have to be blind not to see that the Bernanke-induced crisis is being used by Paulson to funnel money to Goldman Sachs and his other crony favorites."

This has been my take all along, but I don't want any credit for prescience because you'd have to be a blind butthead not to see this.

I'll also reiterate my statement that this isn't socialism, but crony capitalism at it's croniest (yes, I just invented a new word).

[vbmoneyspender]

"Our preference would be to try to help healthy banks become even healthier."

What would you prefer they do, help the badly run banks?

This is what you do in a banking crisis and it is what J.P. Morgan did to stop the 1907 panic. You figure out which banks can survive and you help them and you figure out which ones are beyond saving and you put them to sleep.

[Pearls Before Swine]

Crony or no crony, the US needs bank consolidation. No other major country has this many banks. It is true that the healthy banks have to get healthier, and the bad ones absorbed. When the bad ones go under, their owners (investors) get trashed, as they must.

The bad part comes in if there is preferential treatment to specific entities that the administrators have ties to. That only gets sorted out in retrospect, and only sometimes.

Without this program (which I'm not entirely happy about) there would still be bank consolidation, only with more economic disruption during the settling period.

[cynwoody]

The immediate cause of the financial crisis is counterparty risk. The banks are all afraid to deal with each other because no one is sure which ones are solvent and which are about to topple over. The whole credit system is in danger of seizing up.

So the government's priorities should be

1. Sorting out which banks are healthy and which are not
2. Facilitating the orderly dissolution of the insolvent ones
3. Getting the rules rolled back to 20% down, etc.

Once that's done, certain folks will take big hits. Some marginal people will be back to renting until they save up that 20%. A bunch of yuppie house flippers will go bankrupt, if they aren't already. That's how the cookie crumbles!

But it will soon be back to business as usual for most of us! And the stock market will recover, probably more vigorously than anyone expects.

I don't see the logic in committing a trillion dollars of tax payers' funds to bail out a small number of greedy people who took advantage of the politically correct Community Organizer's approach to real estate finance.