8 thoughts on “The 2008 Bank Bailouts”

  1. It is so frustrating to watch government fools mismanage taxpayer money and voters letting them.

    Nothing in that articles is a revelation. The bailout had absolutely nothing to do with what it was claimed to be for. It had everything to do with political power.

    It was pure corruption and that fool McCain didn’t have a clue.

  2. The market will work, if you let it. All we have to do is to elect people who are inclined to let it.

    [not sarc]
    But letting the market work would cut back on the opportunites for graft and corruption. [\not sarc]

    [sarc]
    Plus, there’s all those bureaucrats who need something to keep them busy. What about the bureaucrats? [\sarc]

    1. There was less corruption in that universe where Spock had a beard. …and that was before he got his hands on that little eliminate your enemies device. …not to mention his hands on that other hottie…

  3. MAybe yes, maybe no.

    I note that none of the “proofs” he offered there were relevant to the explanations I remember reading at the time, which were that large-to-middling corporations often needed very-short-term credit to meet payroll, when income didn’t happen to line up with payroll dates. “Sam’s Club will offer a customer a big credit line at Sam’s Club” and “Amazon might give credit to someone selling via Amazon” are utterly irrelevant to that sort of short-term cyclical lending.

    (And “As Thomas Woods noted in his book Meltdown, banks in 2008 only accounted for 20% of corporate lending. Furthermore, going back 100 years to the early part of the 20th century, according to G. Edward Griffin’s very uneven (and often conspiratorial) book The Creature from Jekyll Island, 70%+ of lending to corporations was of the corporation-to-corporation variety.”

    Quoting “The Creature from Jekyll Island” as a primary source – even with those caveats – takes a whole lot of credibility away. I’ve only ever seen the most paranoid “Jewish Bankers Run The World” types try and tell me to look there for my evidence. I’ll take any claims from that source – no matter how plausible – with a small salt mine as a side, and look askance at the quoter.

    No matter what that guy at Forbes thinks, as far as I know, everyone who was looking at the state of finance at the height of the crisis in 2008 really thought that a general collapse of credit was possible. Might they have been wrong? Yes. Were they all just lying crooks out to scam us? … no.

    The biggest irony there is that in the comments, it takes someone called “Snooki” to point out the actual rationale that was offered for the bank bailouts.

    [For that matter, prop-up loans weren’t the problem. The problem was not letting banks fail in a controlled manner afterwards.])

  4. The market will work, if you let it. All we have to do is to elect people who are inclined to let it.

    Unfortunately that doesn’t include either of the main candidates.

  5. large-to-middling corporations often needed very-short-term credit to meet payroll

    Pure spin. Short term credit is always available. The only question is rate. If the rate gets too high, the corporations simply have to self finance by keeping more cash reserves. As an excuse to bail out banks this is pure horseshit.

    1. If you argue that only those five largest banks have enough cash to make those short term loans (which is more BS) then you are arguing against the bailout since those banks should then be broken up rather than saved so that, that condition doesn’t remain the case.

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