With all due respect, when the government is spending $1.60 for every dollar it takes in, and thus has to borrow money to bail out a bunch of crooks that made bad bets, under circumstances that all but assure we will never get our money back, talk of not losing a dime is ignorant.
Who pays the interest on the money we borrowed to cover the bad bets of European banks? We do. And then each and every dollar we own, a “federal reserve note,” is now the note of a bank that has trashed its own balance sheet by taking on AIG’s toxic debt and swapping it for Treasuries.
Sweeping this problem under the rug of the Fed’s balance sheet does not mean “none of it has lost a dime”. Billions have been lost, and the American people are just too ignorant and propagandized to see it. Even Geithner is out in public talking about losses on AIG, and that is just the direct losses, the tip of the iceberg.
Leaving aside the fact that it benefited everyone by keeping the financial system functioning, and the banks open, protected depositers, revived stock and bond markets, and helped make back $5 trillion in lost asset wealth, and leaving aside the fact that the US financial sector pays the US treasury over $400 billion a year in taxes, and leaving aside the Fed's record profits last year on all its forms of support - paid to the US treasury at year end I might add - none of the money directly invested in major US financial corporations has cost the US taxpayer anything. Bailouts to UAW, cost plenty. Handouts to deadbeat homeowners, cost plenty. Middle class entitlements, the greatest boondoggle waste in world history, cost plenty. None of them get a drop of ink from the populist haters of finance. Why?
Because they hate rich people benefiting in any way, and any cost to themselves has nothing to do with it.
Which is why to me everyone who argues that way and recycles the same commie class war bilge is lower than pond scum. I'll take the bankers over them any day and twice on Sundays.