[GOPJ]

He's right. Bush is rewarding the jerks and hurting the honest banks. In a rational market, the smart honest banks would be picking up business from the foolish banks.

With Bush's interference the bad banks win, and the good banks are played for fools.

I suspect the timing of this crisis - right before an election. The financial mess has been known by anyone who showed the smallest interest for years. My guess is the bad banks and high risk takers felt they had a good chance of being bailed out if the crisis happened right before the election. And it looks like they're right. Bush played into their hand.

[ozzymandus]

Bush’s fault, right? Sounds just like MSNBC.

[old curmudgeon]

There is one very important lesson to be learned from this that I have not seen anyone mention.

The really big financial institutions should be broken up into smaller entities so that never again will we have anyone say that a bank is too big to let fail.

There are thousands of smaller regional banks that are in excellent shape. But even if one of them failed, there are many others like them and life would go on.

The biggies need to be broken up, just as Standard Oil, the railroads and the big meat packers were broken up in the late 1920’s and 1930’s.

[Iron Munro]

I suspect the timing of this crisis - right before an election. The financial mess has been known by anyone who showed the smallest interest for years. My guess is the bad banks and high risk takers felt they had a good chance of being bailed out if the crisis happened right before the election. And it looks like they're right. Bush played into their hand.

How true.

Plug in a weak, lame duck president with heavy duty connections to the finance business and an almost complete disdain for voters. Give him a chance to get even for being steamrollered on the Shamnesty bill and you got the makings of a disaster.

[SauronOfMordor]

He's right. Bush is rewarding the jerks and hurting the honest banks. In a rational market, the smart honest banks would be picking up business from the foolish banks.

You get more of what you reward. If we don't bail out this mess, regular people are going to get burned along with the speculators. But if we DO bail them out, and make speculators feel safe about playing games, they will pull something like this AGAIN in a couple of years. Eventually, we will get a firestorm that is beyond the ability of the American taxpayer to deal with.