Maybe crime was the wrong word to use, more like mistakes that contributed to the economic problems and the problems banks are facing now, pushing loans that were too risky thus resulting in problems for the banks themselves and the people who accepted the loans. In my opinion pushing subprime loans should be a crime, but I don't think it is legally.

The Soviet was only ever held together by force really. The same thing would not happen with the USA, essentially because the Americans are one people.

Well lets see, the Soviet Union no longer exists and the USA has just survived the worst recession since the great depression and is slowly emerging. I'd say we're doing just fine thanks Mr Gorbachev.

p.s. I'd die for capitalism

Really what's funny is, this is an exact case of that "Bad legislation vs terrorism" thing.

The free market is my life.  I would take a bullet for capitalism. 

Perestroika? We should be so lucky.

We American citizens and our political overclass have been utterly corrupted by 60 years of Empire.

We spend $1 trillion per year on a wasteful, unnecessary military-industrial complex which benefits noone but a few giant corporations.

We're losing two wars, neither which should have been launched in the first place, against opponents armed with nothing more fearsome than AK-47s and plastic explosives -- and one of those wars is in Afghanistan. Our CIA created the Taliban back in the 1980s to take down the Soviets, and now the Taliban, our very own creation, is taking our Empire down. To quote Nathan Drake, karma is a b****.

Obama hired a bunch of Wall Streeters to run the financial bailout, resulting in $12.1 trillion in funds, backstops, and guarantees to Wall Street and a pittance to ordinary Americans. I'm not making this number up. Here are the details from Nomi Prins, a former investment banker who worked at Goldman Sachs for years:
http://www.nomiprins.com/bailout.html

15% of our economy is siphoned off by a bloated medico-insurance complex, which doesn't cover 45 million Americans, rakes off profits, and delivers the worst outcomes of any industrial country in the world (which is why our life expectancy is 36th in the world, our infant mortality rates 42nd).

Our bridges are falling apart, our roads are a mess, we nickel-and-dime education to death, real wages for 70% of all Americans have been falling or stagnant for 30 years, the implosion of the housing bubble has ruined millions of lives, and the cost of a university education is driving students into debt serfdom.

Free markets? Don't make me laugh. There's no free market in this country, there's just Government Sachs, a tiny, ruthless financial oligarchy which has gutted the US industrial base, bought off both parties, is using the Federal Reserve as its very own printing press, and is plundering the middle-class like there's no tomorrow.

And don't even think about claiming that I'm writing this because I hate America. I'm an American and I love my country, despite its flaws, deeply and dearly. But it is a cold, hard fact that a combination of Wall Street greed and idiotic militarism is turning my country into a third-rate banana republic.

Hogwash. We're first rate!

Getting out of a recession by stimulating the economy with borrowed money and a high deficit is like solving your personal financial problems by maxing out your credit cards. It may work if you're lucky enough to get a source of revenue to cover up the deficit afterwards, otherwise it just adds to your problems. Of course in the US government's case, the main source of revenue is taxes from citizens, which aren't about to raise to a level which can cover up the deficit.

It's also still very uncertain what will happen to the economy once the stimulus is withdrawn.

Personal finances are nowhere near as complex as an economy, the associated problems with going bankrupt are not similar to the problems of a financial system collapsing.

I agree the economy is still uncertain and your deficit is ridiculous, but I don't think the analogy properly conveys the consequences.

In that post I was talking about the attempted solutions, not the consequences of the economic problems.