| NJ5 said: akuma587 did the stock market fall because of Lehman Brothers's absence, or did it fall because it made people realize just how big a hole the economy was in? By the way it wasn't just LB going bankrupt at that time, so don't blame everything on LB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_crisis_impact_timeline#September_2008 By the way, not all of Lehman Brothers went into bankruptcy. The core business got sold to Barclays. |
The bankruptcy of ten to twenty of these financial institutions would have turned that hole into a canyon. People freak out when banks start failing. There is a reason why you had a run on the banks during the Great Depression. When people don't feel like there money is safe, they want it in their hands right now. When everybody wants their money in their hands right now, banks don't have any money. Banks really only hold 10-20% in assets of what their liabilities are. If you would have had a run on the banks, even banks that were perfectly financially sound would have run out of money.
I'm not just making this stuff up. It already happened once before last century.
I give credit to Bush and Cheney for having enough sense to do something about it. TARP was the smartest decision Bush made while he was in office, although I can't say the Bush Administration handled the money as well as they could have. But they did avert what could have easily rivalled the Great Depression.
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
