For the banks, the real crutch is the mental/precedence crutch of - buy back your equity and go back to running things as normal, and if the system fails we'll

For the banks, the real crutch is the mental/precedence crutch of - buy back your equity and go back to running things as normal, and if the system fails we'll bail you out through nationalization yet again, so for now you can continue to operate under the taxpayer-shared-risk assumption. Using preferred stock was intelligent design in a micro level, but at a macro level the incentives and risk/reward profile constructed by the bailouts and liquidity injections is completely perverse.