Should Government Let the Banks Fail? The 1% vs. the 99%

I was browsing the tube and found this video about Peter Schiff going down to Occupy Wall Street and talking directly to the 99% (and a 1%er who disagrees with his opinion). He's anti-government and I think he makes some good points about how the government should have let the banks fail, let true capitalism prevail and how he wants the government out of the private sector.

I'm curious of other's thoughts on the subject. Should the government have stepped in and saved AIG among others and spent all this taxpayer bailout money? Sure they made a profit, but that profit isn't coming back to the tax payers. What are your guy's opinions on the subject at hand?

 

No your not a troll, but you just posted this in the wrong section, should probably go under Monkeying Around. Anyways, to answer your initial question, I don't think the governments should let banks fail and those that say we should have let them go bankrupt have no idea what they are talking about. The failure of these institutions would have caused a systematic disruption in the world. If we let the banks fail, there is a good chance we would see an era far worse than the Great Depression.

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If we let them fail, it would have been catastrophic and it was absolutely necessary for the gov to do what it did. However, the government should take (and has taken, with Dodd Frank) actions that reduce systemic risk and make it so that a failure of one institution doesn't create ripple effects. Dodd Frank has stuff like the living wills to try to make it so that banks will not have to be bailed out (although it doesn't totally fix the problems). But without these safeguards in place, the government really had no choice, even though the bailouts were unfair. Look at what happened when Lehman went down to see a taste of what would have happened if the government suddenly became libertarian in 2007-2008.

 
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