| akuma587 said: Once again, all of you sound like broken records. Its ludicrous. People always talk so highly about the private sector saying how smart and efficient it is, but when it screws itself over they blame the government? Because of a few policy decisions? That's like blaming the government for putting a no tax weekend on guns for people who are killed as a result of those guns. Sure the government may be somewhat to blame, but you are pointing the finger at the wrong person. There is a difference between allowing something to happen and doing it yourself. It was part of a lot of the independent Wall Street firms' business models to run a 30:1 margin on their assets and liabilities. You guys are blaming the wrong person. Its like blaming a credit card company who gives low interest rates to its clients for those clients racking up huge amounts of debt. I agree that the government should implement a lot more regulations and improve oversight, but why the hell is everyone pointing their fingers at the government rather than the banks who made all these loans? Just because it is easy to blame the government doesn't mean you are blaming the right person. |
The banks are clearly at fault and they should go out of business because of their part in this, there should be investigations whether there was any illegal activity occurring within the banks, and if there was illegal activity the people who performed those acts as well as the executives within the bank should be held legally accountable.
Now, there are (essentially) two ways that you can treat a critical market like the banking/financial sector. There is the big bank model which is how things operate in Canada, where you have massive banks which are heavily regulated to the extent where common sense becomes law; and there is also the small bank model where you allow banks far more freedom to make mistakes but you aggressively prevent banks from becoming too large.
The problem in the United States is they follow the small bank model and have allowed banks to become so big that they are "Too large to fail" ... Long before George W Bush became president these banks should have either been forced to split into smaller institutions or the US should have started to institute regulations to prevent moronic behavior within these large banks. Why people blame the government is that when they should have been reducing risk in the system they were increasing risk through the Community Reinvestment Act and by repealing the Glass-Steagall act.
