Let me see if I have this right . . .
A whole lot of banks got into a financial pickle because they extended risky, ill-advised home loans to Americans desperate to own a home, and then got stuck holding devalued property when the would-be home owners defaulted and housing prices plummeted. The mess got so bad that it caused a general loss of confidence in the financial system, putting even the more conservative and responsible banks at risk of failure. So now the U.S. government is going to buy up the bad debt, and everybody can just start over, making the loans that the economy needs to function.
Is that about it?
I guess we have no choice but to go along with the bail-out plan. But we also need a plan to prevent this mess from happening again.
For starters, I think all the free-market economists and their political supporters should be forced to write five thousand times each on the walls of the NYSE: “I believe in the strict government regulation of markets.”
And they should write it in blood.
Their own.
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