I wish we could do it that easily, but the way the banking system works, if one of those big banks fails, a lot more will go down with it, and that damage would probably dwarf the cost of making cheap loans to banks (but the important part is to plug as many holes in the system after that).

You'd actually be punishing the rest of the US (and the world) more than GS (or any of the other giant banks) if you let them fail. That needs to be fixed, but the time to make a point about that probably wasn't in the middle of a global financial panic.

It really is a wonderful scam. You're so right, if GS failed we'd just be punishing the world.

You're little comment about "THE WAY THE BANKING SYSTEM WORKS" is so insightful.

Everyone that doesn't support taxpayer bailouts of investment banks are ignorant of the banking system and can't comprehend how it works.

I'm not even going to bother with the rest. If you can't imagine any way for the government to fix the problem other than handing out public money to private companies you're a sheep.

I'm not saying that it was done the right way (personally, I would have preferred to avoid the whole problem in the first place with better oversight, and if that wasn't possible, at least give out very high interest loans that will make a profit for the taxpayers when they are repaid), I'm saying that there are thousands and thousands of companies and individuals that depend directly and indirectly on the big banks and on having functioning capital markets, and that if some of the big ones start to fail, most of them will follow suit (big and small) and they'll take down most of the rest of the economy with them.

If you disagree with that, please explain what you think would have happened if lots of big banks and insurance companies had failed.

Not to mention that there are different ways for the government to bail out the banks, and we happened to take a rather outrageous one. We bailed out the banks without wiping out the current shareholders, because the "capitalists" complained about a government takeover of the banks.