“One of the Biggest and Most Elaborate Falsehoods Ever Sold to the American Pubic” (The Bank Bailouts)

 

 

 

” One thing, which I wish Taibbi had emphasized more is that it looks increasingly like credit would not have “seized up” across the board, for very long anyway had the big banks been allowed to fail. The mid-sized banks and the community banks, which lacked exposure to much in the way of toxic assets (because they sold them off to the big banks which then folded them into Mortgage Backed Securities) would have survived. It would have been bumpy but well run banks just outside of big bank status, BB&T for instance, would have filled in the space.

The bailout was, as David Stockman says, a Wall Street crisis. The bankers all freaked out when their bets turned terrible, and then played the information leverage game with Washington to get the tax payers to pay for their mistakes. They basically said that the entire economy was going down (it wasn’t) and therefore an unprecedented abandonment of what was left of our market based economy was justified. It was a giant con. “

 

 

Illustration By Mike Keefe

 

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