Why are banks so holy that Obama won't allow them to fail in order to restore our economy like Iceland did?Imagine that, let the banks fail! Let the criminal bankers take the same risk as any other business venture. Can we imagine Obama ever speaking this way in public? In fact, if the United States was Iceland, President Obama, John McCain, Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Lindsay Graham, Hillary Clinton,... |
A bit of a rant, old chap, but not without merit. Besides, who would want to remember Joe what's-his-name?
Bush bailed out the banks - not Obama. It was the Ronald Reagan/Alan Greenspan deregulation of the banking industry that opened the Pandora's box. In fact, Greenspan and Congress were warned back in 1998 that the over-the-counter derivatives market was going to collapse the financial house of cards that the bankers and brokers had built.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooksley_B...
Duck Dynasty lost two million viewers the second week of its new season. I wonder if any of those two million saw those four guys fishing on private property without the knowledge of the landowner. Kinda like the banks.
Ah, the old fairy-tale version of the Icelandic banking crisis. Sorry, but in the real world, Iceland has never "repudiated its debts" - we actually got quite saddled with debt by the crisis. No politicians were jailed (Haarde went on trial and it was a huge disaster that came across as a political witch hunt and all he got was a slap on the wrist), and the only bankers who went to jail were for outright fraud, just like in the US (your Bernie Madoffs and the like). And the reality of the situation here is higher taxes, heavy austerity, and a massively weakened economy many years after the crisis. Our currency hasn't budged from falling to half its former value (in a country where most goods are imported, at that, and where most loans were denominated in foreign currencies).
In Iceland, just like in the US, it's perfectly legal to destroy the world economy to line your pockets.
There is one difference, which is that our biggest savings banks were not government insured, they're simply mandated to buy private insurance. Your investment banks are uninsured but your savings banks are government insured. When our financial crisis hit, the private insurance fund used by our large banks went bankrupt and couldn't fully pay out. But this has nothing to do with our government (despite the best attempts by the British and Dutch to force it to be). We at no point in time - confirmed by the EFTA court - put any sort of government backing behind our banks. The US savings banking system is built on a guarantee of government backing. So don't whine when you actually have to uphold what you promised. When it came time to choose whether or not to voluntarily bail out non-government-insured banks, like Lehman Brothers, the US made the exact same choice as Iceland - "No."
Banks have quietly been sued for massive judgments, 15 billion for one recently, in a way that didn't cause panic and possible meltdown in 2009 so that's probably a good thing.
Are you talking about the bank bailout bill signed into law in 2008 by BUSH?
"Bush signs $700 billion financial bailout bill - NBC News"
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26987291/ns/bu...
For Christ's sake - can't you people in the GOP remember things since before today's Football game?
The short answer is---because the same people that control the banks are the same people that control the US Presidency.
