This should be common knowledge. Here is one Paulson quote: >You could just see it. We could see it and it was one of the most frustrating--when I look at the

This should be common knowledge. Here is one Paulson quote: >You could just see it. We could see it and it was one of the most frustrating--when I look at the things I could have done better, there were a lot of them and they come out in the book, but the communications challenges were huge. I mean, I sat there when the capital markets froze, before we went to Congress, and the money markets weren't working, and I just tried to think about how to explain this. Because I knew--I was seeing major, blue-chip industrial companies that were having trouble raising financing, so I knew with $3.4 trillion of money market funds, and with everything that was just getting ready to break apart, that if the system had collapsed there'd be thousands and thousands and thousands of mainstream industrial companies--middle-sized companies, large companies--that wouldn't be able to raise their short-term funding, finance their inventories, pay their people. People wouldn't have been able to pay their bills. This would have rippled through the economy. We would then have had--well, today we have over 10% unemployment. That's terrible. And that's after everything we've done. If the system had collapsed, when we were on the brink, unemployement easily could have been at the 25% level that we saw at the Great Depression, and the value destruction--much greater than we've had in terms of home prices and in terms of people's savings accounts and stock portfolios and so on. >https://www.amazon.com/Brink-Inside-Collapse-Global-Financial/dp/B0051BNTI8#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1469020764186 https://www.amazon.com/Brink-Inside-Collapse-Global-Financia... And Bernanke: >He said that bailout was necessary because “we knew that the collapse of the firm would potentially destroy or at least paralyze the global financial system with tremendously bad consequences for everybody.” >http://www.centraljersey.com/news/princeton-former-fed-chairman-ben-bernanke-tells-university-crowd-that/article_98fb276e-783f-11e5-abd3-8f27a8f12747.html http://www.centraljersey.com/news/princeton-former-fed-chair...