Obama Is on the Brink of a Settlement With the Big Banks—and Progressives Are Furious

[stevenleser]

134. I'm trying to decide how I feel about this in the reverse, i.e., what do I want the outcome to be.

The most important thing to me is that the banks and broker-dealer/financial industry not have the ability to destroy the economy again. We have gone through no less than three iterations of that in the last 30 years. The savings and loan crisis, the dotcom bubble, and the mortgage etc. bubble. Is there adequate legislation and regulation in place to prevent that from happening again? My understanding is that the answer to that question is 'No'. Nor is it likely to happen with the GOP controlling one of the branches of the congress. We are stuck there.

The second thing that is important to me is that the people that were hurt get help. I've seen the assertion that those folks will get $17 billion spread out among 11 million people. Unless my math is wrong, that makes the average payout $1545. That is not a meaningful number. That is a problem. Then again, to make it a meaningful number, you need to add two zeroes to the end of $17 billion. That makes it $1.7 trillion. I am not sure what the unintended effects would be of making the banks pay a fine of that amount but I am guessing that would cause another catastrophic economic event. We're stuck here too.

The third thing that is important to me is that those who committed crimes in the process of all of this get punished. Punished can mean a plea arrangement of some sort. The problem is that a lot of what I see that happened isnt criminal. A lot of it is just bad judgement. But yes, if someone or some entity broke the law, make them plead guilty and make them accept some sort of punishment. There little point in this third item, however, if items one and two are not satisfactorally handled.