| Kasz216 said: This assumes all banks were failing. All were not... after all... they found buyers for the first few failed banks, no? Furthermore interestingly enough... one of the most overlooked aspects of this economic downturn is the rise of new banks. There are new banks up opening everywhere in small and mid-level chains, picking up the slack where the big banks screwed up. Had these big banks actually collapsed. The mid level and smaller level banks still would be loaning money. The only issue is... are the mid level banks big enough to take on all the corporate loans companys make to make paroll... since a LOT of companies think money left in hand is money wasted. Overall i'm not sure any of this spending will help much. We build a green energy plant. Great. These people have jobs... they buy stuff at Wal-mart. They take jobs from other power plants... mostly in the US. Where is the stimulus plans that will keep the money in the US? There aren't any, because anytime we do that people challenge tariff wars. It seems like we're screwed either way. Now if we spent a lot of money to establish like... services that aren't usually provided inside the country... that seems like the money that would be worth spending. Tax breaks for building factories inside the US and stuff like that.
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Even good banks could have been hurt by the bad banks failing. People were running from anything with the word financial institution attached to it, even if those companies were in great shape. This was causing even banks that were healthy by relative standards to face potential collapse. The market doesn't operate on perfect information and often operates on complete irrationality. Even a good company can go bankrupt.
And some of the bnaks that bought up these other banks (see Bank of America who bought up Merril Lynch and Countrywide) were hit harder than anyone.
Loaning to mom and pop in small towns is important, but that isn't what keeps a global economy running. And a small to mid level bank cannot just jump up the ranks overnight to a multi-national lending institution that is an intricate part of the global credit market. Banks do way more today than they did 50 years ago, and if anything banks failing now can be more catastrophic than it would have been 50 years ago.
And as to job creation, renewable energy creates a higher percentage of jobs domestically compared to say oil industries who are deeply rooted in foreign markets. And there was a lot more sectors of the economy where money went than just renewable energy or construction. Education and healthcare received a lot of money, and those aren't the kinds of jobs that are easily shipped overseas. And the stimulus was just as much or more about preventing more job losses as it was creating new jobs. The education and construction industries were looking at massive layoffs, upwards of 3-4 million when taken together. Creating a new job may be well and good, but it isn't that useful if you are simultaneously losing jobs you already have.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
