The Fed's charter is to maintain a low, predictable rate of inflation over the medium term and to maximize employment. You (in aggregate) won't have a job if all the employers go bankrupt due to direct investments and contagion. This will directly impact (in aggregate) your ability to make your mortgage payments.
Secondarily, regulation of the financial sector to ensure this doesn't happen again isn't JPow's job, it's the job of Congress.
Bailing out the institutions does not preclude further regulation to prevent the situation from happening again. And it certainly doesn't preclude creating a meaningful social safety net.
Congress should not be in the business of preventing banks from imploding in on themselves via regulation. Congressional regulations should insulate consumers from predatory financial institution practices. FDIC insurance exists to protect consumers in the event their banks behave irrationally. There should be no backstop for the banks themselves. Even if they wanted to Congressional regulations couldn't keep pace with the speed at which financial instruments of institutional suicide are forged.
1 https://www.federalreserve.gov/supervisionreg/reglisting.htm
Unemployed? No. Earn what you did before? Anecdotal, but my parents know a lot of people in their 50s that when laid off, never went anywhere close to their prior salaries.
This was especially true for people who couldn't get their current job with their credentials. Plenty of senior people in places like factories and warehouses don't have degrees for example. Would they find work again if laid off?
probably because you, collectively speaking, kept electing people who didn't pass anti-eviction laws or strengthened tenant rights. Which most countries by the way did put in place during covid at the very least.
Say a factory is poisoning the riverwater, what is more likely to disssuade such actions: penalties to the company (taken in stride as the cost of doing business), or actual jail time and forfeit of assets to the person making the decision and reaping the profits from it?
Or looking at it from another point of view: the money spent on bailouts wouldn't be stored under a mattress if it were not spent that way, therefore you cannot compare $109B with $0. You have to compare it, for example, with the money lost from the moral hazard of rewarding the irresponsible behaviour which led to the most destructive recession in 75 years, or to the effect the money would have had it been spent helping the millions of people that lost their jobs or had their homes foreclosed on, etc.