Or we can do the bailout and let our children have the depression. Either way, someone has to pay the bills of all this spending and reduced wealth generation. /sarcasm
It is only $700 billion. Are you saying that our economy will fail if we don’t inject that credit? If we are already so weak then nothing can stop a collapse.
I’m saying that panic will cause the financial system to collapse. I’m saying we should stabilize the system over the next couple of years and then find the political will to change legislation to prevent these kinds of crimes and bubbles, if that is even possible. We need to overcome this “too big to fail” policy that encourages risky behavior. I don’t know how to accomplish that.
But I would hope we could avoid creating a sudden financial panic when people and institutions drain money market accounts and lending compelely freezes up. A nice depression would certainly clean house among the weak companies, but painfully. I would hope we could restore confidence in the financial
system, stabilize it and only then start reforming this problem through legislation and by aggressively prosecuting the criminals at every level, from CEOs to brokers to lenders to raters appraisers.