Government in general - or just Obama’s Government are you blainmg for the collapse of an artificial model of economics that embraced worthless mortgages sold on street corners and sold them on as equities to underwrite everything?

Seems to me like there should have been some better regulation happening - of credit agencies, of banks, of payday lenders of fanny,freddie and the new instruments designed to subvert the markets like the Shorts and doing away with Sarbanes-Oxley.

Letting the banks collapse was not an option contemplated with anyone serious - it couldn’t be.

AIG insured or reinsured almost every piece of credit paper in the country - and a lot of the world through subsidiaries. If AIG had been allowed to go to the wall the global system would have torn itself asunder - we have gotten off very very lightly. If the big banks had been allowed to go under - and every current account in the country was paid out by the FDIC… is that the way?.
Lets for the hell of it - strip the FDIC out as unwarranted government pillage - and the banks collapsed… with no underwriting for peoples checking, savings or current accounts?. Honest poeple who had no dog in the fight - what do you tell them???. “tough tittys?” - better luck next time, sorry all of your money is gone so that you can’t pay your mortgage or feed your kids… Want to tell people that? - be my guest - be my guest.

Autos - watching a region being laid waste to - and writing it off for a couple of generations is precisely what would have happned if the Autos hadn’t - in a process started by Bush - not found some fiscal backing. Also - at a time of already spiralling unemployment - laying off a couple of hundred thousand in one fell swoop and bankrupting Michigan further with the requirements of emergency relif for employees is the fiscally prudent thing to do? Or again, no relief from the states?… let the workers hang?.

“too big to fail” does not mean that it’s impossible for a firm to fail - it means that if the firm failed there would be catastrophic damage - cataclysmic damage. You have to see how the dots connect. If you can’t see cause and effect - letting the banks go means a few hundred thousand people lose their jobs - sure - but it means you have to build from scratch institutions of decades, and centuries standing.
Same with Autos - if the US manufacturers - minus ford - went to the wall entirely all you get is a stronger Korean and Japanesse economy as their firms build the cars and their firms make the profits.

Seperating “government” from “the people” in a snippy little off hand way gets met with the force of history and the greatest Republican President who said something along the lines of:

“government: of the people, by the people, for the people”

Sure - it was a different time, there was talk of succession, the economy was in bad shape, people were divided and guns were rife among those southerners with grievences… but back in 1863 it was a lot simpler then.