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True, but at the same time they won’t be legally obligated to pay more than 75 million in claims unless there is determined to be criminal conduct. What do we do when they reach 75 million and decide to stop writing checks? I’ll tell you what we will do: me and you and every other taxpayer will have to pay those claims. The Feds will come up with some kind of Save the Gulf Coast Act and stock it chock full of (more) borrowed cash to pay out to anyone who claims they suffered. It will have crappy oversight, be subject to tons of fraud (like Katrina), and generally cost twice as much as what it should.

I don’t think having the government pick some “thrid party” to administer this claims fund is a good idea because it will just be an extension of the Feds and be just as poorly managed. But there needs to be some assurances, solid, legally binding assurances, that BP will go beyond the 75 million cap for paying claims. Otherwise, there is nothing stopping them from doing what you suggest—simply not write any checks because they aren’t legally required to do so.

You are right that an unlimited liability cap would make these kinds of operations more risky for companies of all market caps. However, I contend that the fact that a company might go bankrupt is all the incentive it needs to make the effort to mitigate its risk as much as possible. The investment in safety equipment, disaster recovery plans, training, process improvement, and competent management is always going to be a fraction of the cost of responding to a catastrophic disaster like the one we have today. It’s Management 101—Risk Management.

It is incumbent on any company to protect their business from failing in a financially responsible manner. In this case, it seems pretty clear that BP upper management shirked their corporate responsibility, which is a huge Fail. Instead of spending a couple of hundred million on the items I mentioned above in order to reduce the risk of events like this happening, they now have to spend Billions to clean it up, thus putting them at risk of bankruptcy. In my view that puts the onus squarely on executive management.

As for BP actually walking away...let them. We can put their US operation in receivership and sell it off piece by piece to US companies (who will no doubt be more than happy to pick it up) and recover our tax dollars that way (as someone else suggested a couple posts above). Hopefully, the days of the bailouts are over, and we can look forward to the market regulating itself again.

Sorry, but regardless of Obama’s inexcusable mismanagement of the situation, I as a taxpayer am not going to foot the bill for this monstrosity. And actually, having the Feds in on it would have made it even worse since they can’t get ANYTHING right. I mean, seriously, look at how crappy the response from the Feds has been so far...and you think it would have turned out better had they been in charge of the effort from the start?

This is a case of a company begging for a bailout because their management made some boneheaded decisions. Well, sorry Charlie, but I am all out of bailout money. Go ask GM and Goldman Sachs for some of it.