Nationalize them.
Get rid of the people who had actually caused the crisis, put the banks under some kind of management that would ensure they were actually serving the public, rather than their execs/shareholders, and make sure that the people had enough money/liquidity to make it through the crisis, rather than just giving massive amounts of money to the people who, again, caused the crisis in the first place.
You mean, have the US Government become the largest holders of bank equity (preferred stock) in America forcibly, thereby allowing the US Government to choose the board-of-governers of each banking company to the point where the US Government could call the shots and select the CEO (and other officers) of the companies?
Which is literally what happened? We then used that leverage to forcibly enter those banks into "deals" and force those asset-purchases down their throats?
> Get rid of the people who had actually caused the crisis
That assumes that the US Government could have found better people to run those banks than the people already in charge.
The ugly truth of the politics is, the best people to run the banks were those very same bankers (except this time, with the US Government breathing down their necks).
US Government was the largest preferred stock shareholder after TARP was enacted of all of the major banks in the nation. US Government forced the banks to follow the new regulations and also encouraged the banks to "buy back their equity" (allowing them to become fully private again) in short order.
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-government-no-longer-majorit...
US Government was the largest shareholder and therefore the legal owner of a lot of these banks (and GM/Chrysler, who also got caught up in this).
> then random parts of the country / random parts of the economy blow up, in ways we don't understand.
This is disingenous. The fallout from the banking disaster in 2008 was not random in effect, and we understood it at the time perfectly well.
> It was easier to understand / fix the issues through a bailout, rather than randomly seeing thousands of people get fired at effectively random, as factories close.
You're saying 'random' a lot. Again, the fallout from the economic and banking mismanagement in the US at that time was in no way random, nor inexplicable. You're trying to smear around blame to dilute the responsibility pool.
> Over the next few years, the plan was to reduce the "too big to fail" effect. [...] In 2008, we were too dumb and ignorant to see "too big too fail". But in 2022, we remember the issue.
This is absurd and wrong. The US in no way planned to reduce the "too big to fail" effect. You are simultaneously implying that the US glibly ignored "too big to fail" in 2008, and somehow was too ignorant to know about it??
> With any luck, our banking system is properly containerized and safe. No bailouts should be necessary to save our economy.
Bailouts in 2008 and later years were not intended to save the economy. A simple understanding of calculus would show a competent onlooker that the amount of money dispensed in government bailout schemes came nowhere close to the amount of money needed to stop the economic collapses in the US. The bailouts were, and are, only capable of -- and only intended to -- prevent rioting in the streets.
You're pushing a really weird agenda in a very half arsed way.
You're saying "agenda" a lot.
> The US in no way planned to reduce the "too big to fail" effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodd%E2%80%93Frank_Wall_Street...
> An Act to promote the financial stability of the United States by improving accountability and transparency in the financial system, to end "too big to fail", to protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts, to protect consumers from abusive financial services practices, and for other purposes.
Now maybe you don't like Dodd Frank, or maybe you don't think it goes far enough. But anyone who was paying attention to politics can easily list off the laws and changes we did to our economy to try to fix the identified problem.
We _tried_ to fix it. No way to know if we really fixed it until our next crisis. But I can always point to what our President did (both George Bush _AND_ Obama handled this mess, with the same plan btw), as well as Congress's laws.
The very phrase "Too big too fail" exists because of the outstanding effort this country put into identifying the problem, and discussing possible solutions. You're literally using the language of Congress whenever you use those words.
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USA isn't perfect. And Republicans / Democrats have different ideas of what "would fix" the problem. But what I can say with 100% certainty, is that George Bush + Obama acted in similar manners through the crisis, suggesting that the two grossly different ideologies came to similar conclusions about what would solve the issue.
EDIT: There are also multiple days / weeks worth of Congressional hearings on this subject, proving that Congress was discussing solutions for a long time.
1. First and foremost: because George Bush was forced. The Republicans are famously against interfering with the free market, so George Bush let the first couple of banks fail, and fail, and fail... by the time Bear Stearns failed, there were already many bank failures and George Bush still didn't bail them out.
2. The big failures, specifically: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, had a big effect on the economy. Remember, George Bush _LET_ these banks fail, he wanted to be hands-off. The collapse of these two banks set of a large set of cascading bank failures that had an outsized effect on the "normal people's economy" of main street. George Bush started getting random phone calls from factories who "suddenly couldn't meet payroll", because their banks failed. It became obvious that bank-failures would lead to factory closures.
3. It was at this point, that George Bush took the unprecedented step to start saving banks. It was clear that the country couldn't take another $200+ Billion bank failure. Congress passed TARP and that was it. The banks were saved.
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Everyone agreed that saving the banks was allowing "moral hazard" to take place. But as what was discussed at the time, banks of that size are "too big too fail". If we, as a country, "let them fail", then random parts of the country / random parts of the economy blow up, in ways we don't understand.
It was easier to understand / fix the issues through a bailout, rather than randomly seeing thousands of people get fired at effectively random, as factories close.
Over the next few years, the plan was to reduce the "too big to fail" effect. As the US Economy was setting up new regulations to prevent "too big to fail", cryptocoins started up, and decided to recreate the too-big-to-fail problem all on their own.
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In 2008, we were too dumb and ignorant to see "too big too fail". But in 2022, we remember the issue. With any luck, our banking system is properly containerized and safe. No bailouts should be necessary to save our economy.