Sanders Releases Explosive Bailout List

[girl gone mad]

45. Your analysis relies on some fairly extreme historical revisions.

"most of these loans were paid back, the taxpayers made money."

I'm not going to get into a discussion on how the Fed operates, but it isn't correct to say that the taxpayers made money. First of all, many of these specific loans were paid back via secondary and tertiary government bailouts. Second of all, the Fed is still holding toxic assets purchased at mark-to-myth prices. It will be a long time before we know the ultimate outcome of these policy decisions.

"without a banking system, we are fucked. or at least, if the banking system we have crashes, we are fucked. "

Here you've offer up a false choice. Not a single critic of our bank bailouts was promoting the dissolution of the entire banking system. Most wanted to follow a course of action that is fairly standard and has been implemented many times throughout history. One which would have seen the bondholders and shareholders take losses rather than having all of those losses pushed onto the taxpayer.

"did it take too long to "trickle down" to the small businesses that were squeezed? yes. did it get there eventually? mostly. did we hit the kind of depths that we did in 1929? not by a long shot. "

There is no indication that the money ever trickled down to small businesses. Bank lending continued to decline after the bailouts. The only reason that we did not end up in a 1929 style depression is because of fiscal measures enacted by the federal government: the automatic stabilizers put in place after the Great Depression (unemployment, food stamps, etc., all of which increased sharply) and the stimulus and payroll tax cuts.