[Defiant]

I believed at the time that TARP would subsidize failures that should not be transferred to taxpayers. The problem, as you recognize, is the impact bank failures would have on the entire economic system. I was of the belief that a revision of some accounting rules, such as mark to market, combined with spreading write-downs over a 5 year period and a whole laundry list of other action items that were available, would save the system, allow a few of the worst offenders (Countrywide, etc.) to fail and allow the others to survive, albeit with a significantly reduced worth and shareholder loss. As it should be. It should have been a chapter 11 workout of the bad financial situation in which the shareholders get reduced equity, and instead it became a new loan for the enterprise in which nobody lost anything. That is unsustainable.

I was waiting for the whole thing to collapse after 09, and I will say this about those who are manipulating the financial system: they are good. How they kept this afloat with Obama adding 10 trillion in debt is beyond me.

[Pelham]

“I believed at the time that TARP would subsidize failures that should not be transferred to taxpayers.”

The crime is that it could have been done without transferring the losses to America’s taxpayers. Sweden did it with their largest bank. The management was fired, the stockholders took the hit. They appointed a gov’t administrator who ran the bank until it was straightened out enough to sell it back to the private sector. It didn’t cost their citizens a cent. Bush’s team must have known about this if I did, it’s their job. I suspect that they were far too cozy with the people who would take the hit if we used the Swedish model. An ugly case of cronyism that screwed the American public. And we had experience with something like this ourselves in the S&L crisis less than 20 years earlier.

[Unrepentant VN Vet]

I was waiting for the whole thing to collapse after 09, and I will say this about those who are manipulating the financial system: they are good. How they kept this afloat with Obama adding 10 trillion in debt is beyond me.

All of which makes me wonder about the results of The 0 calling those "manipulators" some morning with instructions to shut down the Bubble Machine....or if they'll just be left in place as insurance against too-vigorous investigation into the real destination(s) of all that money.

(That's not a tinfoil hat talking. I grew up outside of Chicago and view these sorts of things as almost expected practice...although the scale IS pretty eye-popping.)