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TARP should have come with extremely strong regulation and bearing teeth. Fire the executives, claw back their bonuses and cancel their golden parachutes, and w

TARP should have come with extremely strong regulation and bearing teeth. Fire the executives, claw back their bonuses and cancel their golden parachutes, and where proven to be culpable (which we now know, wouldn't have been hard to prove) should have served lengthy prison sentences. Essentially, bankrupt the boardrooms and executives involved and you send a very clear message about tolerance. There is no reason the decision makers at the top should have been able to use TARP cash to pay themselves bonuses. Its not all about the money, at the end of the day. Its what you do with it. It should have had more strings attached. The banks should've been broken up again to undo the nonsense de-regulations from the 1980s and 1990s that exposed "main street' to such speculation in the first place. Mind you, if individuals or smaller organizations did what the banks did, we would call them pyramid schemes and fraudsters and arrest all of them and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law, not bail them out to continue business as usual

hluska 3y ago
TARP was a decision made in a remarkably short time while the global financial system was burning. And it had to be made while the United States was facing a systemic wide crisis. Moreover some of the major banks did not want the money. Some major employers in the United States were about to miss payroll. The most famous story was a McDonalds franchisee who was not going to be able to make payroll. They didn’t hold cash on hand and needed banks to keep rolling paper. When McDonalds franchisees cannot make payroll, there’s a potential for tent cities. If they had years, I’m sure things would have been different. Incidentally, Ben Bernanke got so sick of that line of questioning that he is no longer a registered Republican. He’s one of the people who pulled us back from the brink of recession and I don’t know he’s treated with the appropriate respect.

hluska 3y ago

TARP was a decision made in a remarkably short time while the global financial system was burning. And it had to be made while the United States was facing a systemic wide crisis. Moreover some of the major banks did not want the money. Some major employers in the United States were about to miss payroll. The most famous story was a McDonalds franchisee who was not going to be able to make payroll. They didn’t hold cash on hand and needed banks to keep rolling paper. When McDonalds franchisees cannot make payroll, there’s a potential for tent cities. If they had years, I’m sure things would have been different. Incidentally, Ben Bernanke got so sick of that line of questioning that he is no longer a registered Republican. He’s one of the people who pulled us back from the brink of recession and I don’t know he’s treated with the appropriate respect.