If this were about sustaining credit activities, they would have separated the banks' activities into the good, the bad and the shoot-on-sight-illegal.
The shoot-on-site-illegal activities would have been rendered null and void by decree. The bad activities would have been dumped on the holding companies, which would then have gone bankrupt. That is not a problem; holding companies are just hedge funds writ big - they are not structurally important. The good activities would have been put into good banks, which would then be solvent.
That's how you do it if you want to solve the problem. It's been done before. It's reasonably cheap. And it always works. Failure on part of the regulators to do so amounts to wilful mendacity, in the same way that failing to break for a red light amounts to wilfully endangering nearby pedestrians.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
What other game, to put it bluntly, is so boring to watch? (Bowling and golf come to mind, but the sound of crashing pins and the sight of the well-attired strolling on perfectly kept greens are at least inherently pleasurable activities.)
(From yesterday's OT) In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
They'll tell you that would have risked to plunge the Dow to oil-pocket levels.
I fail to see any problem with that, which cannot be solved by giving our railways, electrical grid, ports and other infrastructure an overhaul.
Except there is no money.
Last time I checked, people were not divesting themselves of US Treasuries. The US government has an excellent credit (for reasons that I personally fail to understand, but hey...).
Dow down means no more investor confidence, no more economic funding,
Private investors are irrelevant. The US has a gargantuan backlog of essential public spending that would need to be done anyway. Lack of private spending simply means that it can be started today, rather than slowly over the next ten or twenty years.
and with our happily-spending drown-in-debts countries, paying for such overhaul would pose the obvious problem of where they'll finally take the money from.
Monetise future tax revenues.
And for the case of the US and UK, repatriate wealth from tax frauds who hide money in flag of convenience countries.
All cross-border transactions in your currency are cleared by your central bank, and it is in the nature of a flag-of-convenience country that a substantial part of their assets are in foreign currencies, making them vulnerable to this kind of action.
Which is why the British people should start sharpening their pitchforks and oiling their torches.
In a democracy, the people can and should take the state away from the government when the government misbehaves.
