http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/w...my-is-mending-amid-europes-malaise.html?_r=1& Iceland let 3 of their largest banks fail and it ensured that tax payers got their money back and gave debt relief to struggling homeowners and to businesses facing bankruptcy. And their economy is booming! This is completely contrary to the propaganda that our left-wing liberal friends continuously parrot that the economy would have gone another Great Depression if we hadn't bailed the banks out. The people who needed the bailouts the most, homeowners, didn't get any. Instead we gave money to a bunch of 1%ers to bail their businesses out while those who lost their homes went poor, homeless, and hungry, and had to lose their independence by getting on the welfare dole. No thanks to the reckless actions of the federal government passing a century's worth of bad regulations. Iceland is evidence that our economy would have been much better off and recovered much more quickly if we had let the free market crush those Wall Street bankster 1%ers.
It just goes to show that all this "to big to fail" banking stuff doesn't work. The liberals need to wake up! Get rid of all these huge banks, or break them up into smaller banks, we'll be better off without them....And for the love of Christ, don't be afraid to prosecute and punish those who break the rules. As Iceland shows, just ensure that the tax-payers get their money back and everything will be fine, or better.
The great irony of this is that Liberals try to cry that they're for the 1%. Or that they understand economics and how the Private Market has ALWAYS generated capital, has always made the heart of civilizations thrive. Don't listen to Liberalism, ever on the account of economics. They have a 100+ year old history of failing. You'd think for such an epic account of failure they'd rethink their failed policies, but apparently any and all failure can be blamed either on the faulty system they created and/or its opponents. Never, on actual liberalism itself.
We should have let them fail and allowed the Mid-Sized Regional banks that followed sound lending and banking practices grow to the National stage. You reward winners and let losers die. We got it 100% wrong. To compound the problem the Quantitative Easing has done nothing but benefit these same massive banks to the detriment of the rest of America. When that bill comes due we are all screwed. The inflation it is causing is nothing more than a massive tax on the poor and middle classes.
Your premise is ridiculous, as if the "leftards" were the only people in America who were saying that the banks needed to be bailed out. Unless you are calling everyone who works in finance a "leftard", which is weird. Iceland's solution was a lot more "left-wing" than America's.
It's an issue/event that transcends petty political distinctions...some people (typically rich and well-connected people, politicians or people working in finance) favored the bailout, while most of the rest of America opposed it.
As a libertarian I agree we should let the banks fail. But if I was an owner of the bank, I would be SCREAMING that the banks were basically forced to make bad loans. All of the weird investment schemes and tricky recalculations don't mean a damn thing if we handy created all this false wealth through inflated home prices. Who do you blame more really, the government for messing wight their system, or the banks for taking as much advantage of it as they could.
On a side note, do you know how much money individuals made by betting the government wouldn't let the banks fail? I personally at 26 put as much as I could (about 13,000) into BofA when it hit a buck ninety ($1.90) then watched it quadruple before I sold. Can you imagine all of the rich people who made larger amounts off the same? I have found that wealthy people simply take advantage of situations better than others.
Uhhhhh no. Bailing banks or automotive companies or people or anybody else out is a PURELY socialist construct. There is no such thing as a bailout or a subsidy in a capitalist economy. In a capitalist economy those company's that are going into bankruptcy either restructure and succeed or their fail... period. There is no bailout. That is BY FAR the best method. They all should have failed. All of the automotive and financial company's as well as the people who got mortgages they couldn't afford should have failed. It would have been far better for the economy.
I'm not sure banks going Tango Uniform in a tiny, insignificant economy is the same thing as the banking system in the economy that is the global reserve currency. But having said that, we need to reinstate Glass-Steagal as soon as possible.
Iceland’s jailed bankers ‘a model’ for dealing with ‘financial terrorists’ By jailing four top officers of Iceland's failed Kaupthing Bank, the country showed the world the right way to deal with the people largely responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, said Charlie McGrath, founder of news website, Wide Awake News. The US and other nations must take it as a model for the next time the too-big- to-fail corporations screw things up and ask for a bailout with taxpayers’ money, he added. http://rt.com/op-edge/iceland-bank-sentence-model-246/
I don't know that it is a "liberal" thing, but the US should have let a few more banks fail just as a lesson to those that remained.