>Jake, I'm expecting you will have heard the saying "don't cut off your nose to spite your face?" There may have been satisfaction in cutting off the banks, but society would have been hideously disfigured too.

>If you want to pursue principle, you need to decide whether it's an act of faith or an intellectual decision. IMHO business has to be an intellectual decision, meaning you must constantly review the principles to ensure they still apply. In this case I don't think they do. A small number of institutions and individuals benefited from behaviors that caused a one-way extraction of trillions of dollars from society. No sane society would regard that as a success. So now we need to be sure it won't ever happen again- and to try to recoup as much as possible for the benefit of the poor old taxpayer. The apparent desire from some bankers to "get back to normal asap" is not a promising sign. Those people need to be corralled and managed for at least a generation in the hope that future practitioners won't be exposed to greedy destructive behaviors and may be able to be trusted again at some point.

I understand and accept the consequences as the deployed "solutions" have not solved anything. The cash infusion has merely delayed and exacerbated the problem. In addition the principal architects of the disaster, the politicians, are freshly infused with campaign contributions to ensure their seat of power does not sway while they proclaim how forced-into-TARP entities will run their businesses. The debt-load swells, the next housing crash is on the horizon and we're set to impose further crippling entitlements upon the shaky economy. This will not end well yet Nero fiddles.

Our medicine is coming and I'd prefer to take it now while we can still recover, with the added benefit that a crash will ensure a house/senate cleaning which is desperately needed.