They both did at different times so that's a correction for your correction

And every senior financial advisor said that allowing the banks to fail would have been utterly catastophic for the economy and the country as a whole. Both Bush and Obama really had no choice.

In Britain we also had a bank bail-out scandal, over a bank called Northern Rock. My understanding is that there's a cycle:

> greedy banks make dodgey investments
> directors take huge bonuses and deflate bank funds
> bank teters on brink of collapse, which would wipe out small customers' savings
> to avoid above, government bails out bank with taxpayers' money
> bank survives, directors are off the hook and return to collecting fat-cat bonuses
> the only net losers are the taxpayers, who as usual have to suck it up

If Dodd-Frank prevents or inhibits that damaging cycle, then it's a mistake to repeal it, I would've thought.

It's huge mistake. Hopefully some republican senators vote their conscious and it fails to get through.

Well, I can think of something. Arrest and imprison the Wall Street Scum. Give the funds they already have back to have savings in hard cash (using the billions that were used to supplement the crooks who stole it in the first place, when needed) and to further help the people and punish the greedy corporate scum forgive all the outstanding (almost always predatory) loans they had a given. In the mean time, honest people could open community banks used how they were meant to be used in the first place.

Or do what was done: funnel billions, maybe trillions over time, to billionaires and then ask stupid ****ing questions like how could Hillary lose. Why don't Americans give a **** about honesty anymore...

Dude, I don't exactly know your story but this mindset that the rich must be protected at all costs is what was used to **** you in the ass.

Re-read my post. Bush and Obama basically had no choice at the time. Did I like it? Of course not. Did I want to see my 401K and home values crash and burn even worse than they already had? No. It's not MY mindset. It was the mindset of financial specialists on how to best handle that absolute disaster in the best interests of the US as a whole.

Were the banks wrong for what they did? Of course. Should they all be in jail? Of course. Is it that easy? Unfornuately not based on how the politicians and rich have set up the rules.

We could have let the banks fail, arrest the CEOs, and felt good about it. But millions and millions of people would have lost everything. Another case of the lesser of two evils.

I read your post. You're buying into the bull**** narrative that you'll have suffer along with the rich. They should have used that bailout money to buy out your 401K and payoff your house and reimburse you for the damage they did to the housing market. People like you should get the bailout not the ****ing billionaires. Everyone's credit card debt should have been erased, home loans, car payments, student debt, and if the bailout didn't cover it start stripping the military.

Who is THEY?

The money spent to bail out the banks, $700 Billion, amounts to nothing compared to what you are suggesting.

The US population is 325 million people. If we assume 50% have lots of normal life debt, $700 billion would have netted me less than $4,500.

It's all about math in the grand scale of things.

Military

And the real cost of the bailout

Trillions

The real cost of the bailout was $7.7 trillion, and it was given no strings attached from my understanding.