With the layoffs & collapsing economy, wouldn't it have been cooler to "let it collapse" last fall?!

[HamdenRice]

While I think it's obvious that Paulson was singularly incompetent at implementing the bailout, it did prevent the immediate collapse of Citibank and Bank of America.

Considering what's happened, I wonder how much "cooler" it would have been if Congress had ignored the judgment of both Barak Obama and Barney Frank and said, "let it collapse," and just let these two behemoths, well, collapse. I wonder what it would have been like if all of their counter-parties -- all the people with deposits at those banks, all the bondholders of those banks, all retailers who use their accounts, all the Citi and BoA credit card holders, all the factories still with revolving credit from them -- in essence everyone engaged in any transaction with Citi or BoA had just been stiffed, as well as anyone engaged in any transaction with anyone engaged in a transaction with Citi or BoA.

I'm trying to imagine if Citi and BoA had collapsed around November -- and basically if the ATMs had stopped working, if paychecks had been deposited without the corresponding funds being credited to the depositors' accounts, if money market accounts had "broken the buck" for weeks on end meaning people lost money by keeping it in the bank, and if the commercial paper market had become permanently frozen, and instead of the hundreds of thousands of layoffs per month, we had just gotten it over with in a day or two, with millions being told to go home over night. Would we be debating whether a stimulus package could prevent a terrible recession from turning into depression under those circumstances?

It's hard to say exactly what we averted, but when you play out the scenarios, all I can say is that it would have been so cool to the doomers, the "let it fail" crowd, the neo-Malthusians, the neo-tribalists, and the Dems and Repugs are exactly the same and in thrall to their international masters crowd !!!

For them, it would have been, like, totally, totally keewwll!!!

[damntexdem]

1. It would certainly have been 'cooler' for millions who would have faced ...

winter conditions already passed without jobs to fund their heating bills, as well as other necessities of life.

[dkofos]

2. The only thing averted by the bailout was the rich bastards not getting their well deserved bonuses.

[ThomWV]

3. You got that right!

Yes indeed, it would have been so keewwll!! At last my son and I could have come to understand what my father was talking about with all his ranting about how bad the Great Depression was (father born in 1917). How keewwll!!.

Sometimes I wonder though if there might have been some way to focus and confine the damage so that a few massive failures could have been quickly followed up by takeover and then Federal massive shoring up of mid-cap banks to fill the breech as they bought up the asserts of their one time betters. That too might have been keewwll were it not for the garbage derivatives and similar trash having apparently become omnipresent in financial circles. Not so keewwll.