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Should we have let the banks fail?

Should we have let the banks fail?

  • Yes

    Votes: 11 73.3%
  • No

    Votes: 4 26.7%

  • Total voters
    15

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
(If you feel it isn't an accurate portrayal of what happened, then have at it.)

I had the good luck the first time I saw The Big Short to have seen it in the company of a person who is familiar with what happened from the point of view of "sort of insider" (He wasn't a real insider. Just working in the neighborhood, so to speak). He told me the movie was substantially accurate except a lot more people knew ahead of time what was going to happen than the movie let on was the case. That was his biggest criticism of it. The rest matched up with his knowledge, and with what's he's learned from people much closer to the real action.
 

SpeaksForTheTrees

Well-Known Member
I had the good luck the first time I saw The Big Short to have seen it in the company of a person who is familiar with what happened from the point of view of "sort of insider" (He wasn't a real insider. Just working in the neighborhood, so to speak). He told me the movie was substantially accurate except a lot more people knew ahead of time what was going to happen than the movie let on was the case. That was his biggest criticism of it. The rest matched up with his knowledge, and with what's he's learned from people much closer to the real action.
We saw it early in headlines like
HIGH OIL PRICES HURT AIRLINES
short , short
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
I don't believe in letting the Big Banks fail, because I think it's highly likely that would bring on a worldwide depression on the order of the Great one. But I do believe in breaking up the banks so that it is safe to let them fail. Letting their banks fail is what Iceland did, and it seems to have worked out for them rather well. I'd also prosecute and imprison any bankers that were guilty of wrongdoing.
 

SpeaksForTheTrees

Well-Known Member
I stopped trading commodities , just didn't feel right benefiting from others misfortune and ignorance.
Went right against the grain felt real guilty was all tax free became a worshipper of mammon for a little while but I'm cured now (shudders)
 
We (the global economy) can only kick the can down the road so far. Eventually, we're going to take a bite of the nasty sandwich, chew it and swallow it. Then after the taste is gone, we can figure out a new economy.

I've been interested in a commodity-based economy but I admit my knowledge of economic extends only as far as the class in microeconomics and the class in macroeconomics I had in college. That was quite some time ago. I do know I'm currently broke though, so there is that.
 
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freethinker44

Well-Known Member
I don't believe in letting the Big Banks fail, because I think it's highly likely that would bring on a worldwide depression on the order of the Great one. But I do believe in breaking up the banks so that it is safe to let them fail.
Yeah, I agree. I kind of answered the poll wrong. When I hear the question about letting them fail, I interpret it to mean "should we have bailed them out?" I don't think we should have just stood by and done nothing while they imploded, but we shouldn't have bailed them out. I think we should have seized the assets of any distressed banks and transferred them to smaller banks.
It would be nice if we could trust the government enough to have a state owned bank.
 

freethinker44

Well-Known Member
I stopped trading commodities , just didn't feel right benefiting from others misfortune and ignorance.
Went right against the grain felt real guilty was all tax free became a worshipper of mammon for a little while but I'm cured now (shudders)
That's why I stopped day trading. I don't understand how that isn't illegal. I felt like I was stealing from people. I wasn't investing, I was just taking a little off the top of companies that were successful for a few minutes.
 

SpeaksForTheTrees

Well-Known Member
That's why I stopped day trading. I don't understand how that isn't illegal. I felt like I was stealing from people. I wasn't investing, I was just taking a little off the top of companies that were successful for a few minutes.
Day trading bit like playing smash and grab lmao
I was connected to broker on actual trade floor who would execute the trades.
Was my own money initially earned by long hours of hard work .
Day trading can work so long as you budget roll over and overnight fees , most get in to deep and cannot hold during fluctuations .
However take to much money off these online brokers they will increase your margins to force a close
It all wants banning imho
 

SpeaksForTheTrees

Well-Known Member
This what happened had same effect as 1970s oil embargo , energy spending became more than a certain % of GDP
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_energy_crisis
People lost thier jobs , people where not thinking of moving all this crisis , a knock on effect demand for housing slowed , uncertainty, then went negative .
And the rest is bail out , was some huge winners is wrong but there you go.
 

Shadow Wolf

Certified People sTabber & Business Owner
They should have failed and died. It's nothing but bull**** that they got money - some of them so their executives could have lucrative bonuses and lavish vacations - for messing up but people who lost their jobs and their homes through no fault of their own had to take the blow.
Didn't the government offer refinancing programs for those who weren't able to pay their mortgages?
They had programs, but they weren't that good. My friend and her family for several months were uncertain about their own future and if they'd be able to keep their home or not.
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
Is just wealth transfer mate let them have it
Keeps the peace better than transfering wealth via wars.
Wars are a loss of wealth, not a transfer.
This delusion that wars are an economic boon is so widespread,
that it might explain the lust for war among both Dems & Pubs.
 

SpeaksForTheTrees

Well-Known Member
Wars are a loss of wealth, not a transfer.
This delusion that wars are an economic boon is so widespread,
that it might explain the lust for war among both Dems & Pubs.
This prophecy, by Benjamin Franklin, was made in a "CHIT CHAT AROUND THE TABLE DURING INTERMISSION," at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention of 1787. This statement was recorded in the dairy of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a delegate from South Carolina.
"I fully agree with General Washington, that we must protect this young nation from an insidious influence and impenetration. The menace, gentlemen, is the Jews.
In whatever country Jews have settled in any great number, they have lowered its moral tone; depreciated its commercial integrity; have segregated themselves and have not been assimilated; have sneered at and tried to undermine the Christian religion upon which that nation is founded, by objecting to its restrictions; have built up a state within the state; and when opposed have tried to strangle that country to death financially, as in the case of Spain and Portugal.
For over 1,700 years, the Jews have been bewailing their sad fate in that they have been exiled from their homeland, as they call Palestine. But gentlemen, did the world give it to them in fee simple, they would at once find some reason for not returning. Why? Because they are vampires, and vampires do not live on vampires. They cannot live only among themselves. They must subsist on Christians and other people not of their race.
If you do not exclude them from these United States, in their Constitution, in less than 200 years they will have swarmed here in such great numbers that they will dominate and devour the land and change our form of government, for which we Americans have shed our blood, given our lives our substance and jeopardized our liberty.
If you do not exclude them, in less than 200 years our descendants will be working in the fields to furnish them substance, while they will be in the counting houses rubbing their hands. I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude Jews for all time, your children will curse you in your graves.
Jews, gentlemen, are Asiatics, let them be born where they will nor how many generations they are away from Asia, they will never be otherwise. Their ideas do not conform to an American's, and will not even thou they live among us ten generations. A leopard cannot change its spots. Jews are Asiatics, are a menace to this country if permitted entrance, and should be excluded by this Constitutional Convention.

Fed reserve was created 1913 if you hadn't you would of faced war with the whole of Europe , seeing as you did accept , Europe was put into state of war and transfers began to the new US base .
Napoleon broke the British our monarchy aquired huge debts to fight Napoleon .
The bankers financed both sides , British won but lost control of its currency .
War is about who can raise the most money to pay the troops.
American grunts being used to force agenda , they finally got an army .
All we need now is an American moshiach president thought was barrack but might not be .
USA being Balkanized
Awareness
https://thedaysofnoah.wordpress.com...1901-1919-the-secret-creators-of-world-war-1/

President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963 and the United States Notes he had issued were immediately taken out of circulation. Federal Reserve Notes continued to serve as the legal currency of the nation. According to the United States Secret Service, 99% of all U.S. paper “currency” circulating in 1999 are Federal Reserve Notes.

Few people know the facts about the singular event that helped spark what ultimately became known as World War II - the international Jewish declaration of war on Germany shortly after Adolf Hitler came to power and well before any official German government sanctions or reprisals against Jews were carried out. The March 24, 1933 issue of The Daily Express of London (shown above) described how Jewish leaders, in combination with powerful international Jewish financial interests, had launched a boycott of Germany for the express purpose of crippling her already precarious economy in the hope of bringing down the new Hitler regime. It was only then that Germany struck back in response. Thus, if truth be told, it was the worldwide Jewish leadership - not the Third Reich - that effectively fired the first shot in the Second World War. Prominent New York attorney Samuel Untermyer (above right) was one of the leading agitators in the war against Germany, describing the Jewish campaign as nothing less than a "holy war."
 
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Laika

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
What is your own view on the bank bailouts of 2008? Should they have happened?

If your answer is 'No', what is the solution then to prevent this from happening again? And don't say 'more regulation', try and be specific. And especially don't say "vote Bernie", I'd just like a specific solution if you have one.

Voted "No". Whilst this goes against pretty much everything Capitalism stands for and is conventionally understood as, the banks are "too big to fail". Back in 2008, if there hadn't have been a bailout, virtually all forms of currency would have been useless. There simply would not have been a banking system as the ATMs would have stopped giving people their money. Capitalism would have died overnight and brought western civilisation down with it. We would be talking Great Depression Territory at least.

There were also some discussions amongst the high-ups" in the government that if this should happen, they would have to nationalise the entire banking sector and put it into government ownership- making the US resemble China's economy system. The economic crisis was an existential crisis for global capitalism and free markets only work as long as people think there money is actually worth something. if they stop thinking they can go into a shop and use their dollars to pay for goods and services, they have to resort to barter or we end up in the Weimar Republic situation where you cna leave a basket full of money out in the street and people will steal the basket.

Because of how inter-related all the financial services are, and that they are holding each others debt. what happened was that basically "the music stopped" and nobody knew who was holding the bad debt, so they wouldn't lend to each other. they had a good thing going and even when they knew the risks they didn't want it to end. regulators were not going to step in and take the blame for bringing down the house of cards before the crisis happened. letting one bank fail threatens to bring them all down. So we aren't simply talking about punishing one bank with bankcrupcty, but the collapse of the entire global financial system.

Back in 08 in the UK, my understanding is that Alastair Darling (then the Chancellor) got all the leading financiers in a room and told them to work out a deal. It started getting late so he said "I'm going to bed- you figure something out by the morning", and that's how the UK bailout was created. If they hadn't reached a deal all of the above would have happened and the UK financial system would have gone bust within a week- and the world would follow. So even the bailout that we got was a close run thing.

Honestly- there isn't a way to prevent it from happening again (and if there is another one in the next couple of years, the US/UK governments won't have the money to do a bail out and that will be "it"). Next time it will probably be bigger and you are starting to talk about the tolerances of the entire system to cope with something "that big" failing. We can manage capitalim's crises but we can't prevent them (admittedly a marxist view point). the best we can do is use regulation to make it easier to handle and less serve but the contradiction between the expansion of production and the limited purchasing power of the public means we get crises of "over-production" from time to time. personal, banking and government debt are simply the way we resolve that contradiction in the short-run but it only makes the crises bigger.

If you want another movie to watch I'd reccomend "Margin Call" as it looks at the crisis in terms of the moral calculations of actually starting the crisis for a bank to survive. "Wall Street II:Money never sleeps" does touch on the issue of "Moral Hazard" of bailing banks out but it isn't a good movie in my view. But J.K.Galbraith's "The Great Crash, 1929" is well worth a read. I have an older copy where he recalls giving a deposition to a congressional committee in 1958 about the great depression as a stock market crash is under-way and everyone starts blaming him for simply mentioning in the subject in his book.

*shakes head*
Bankers!
 

The Emperor of Mankind

Currently the galaxy's spookiest paraplegic
So far 5 Yes votes and 0 No votes.

Yet not a single comment explaining how such a huge blow to economic stability and the potential societal chaos as people lose all their money is defensible.

That's not necessarily what would happen. Look at Iceland - they refused to bail their banks out and their economy didn't collapse into a singularity of insolvency.

Bailing out debt-ridden financial institutes is like saving blight-infested crops from a fire. What was saved was of questionable value, the farmer ultimately stands to lose more because he can't use what would have been a clear space to plant newer, healthier crops, and these plants run the risk of poisoning other fields.

Sure, if we had let the banks fail there would have been economic turmoil; change only comes through pain after all. But we'd have the chance to grow an economy that wasn't centred around something so arbitrary & subjective as the value of money.
 
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