Occupy Wall Street, London and Evereywhere Else

For the bailouts, they just needed the banks to go through bankruptcy, sell their assets and use those to reimbourse those who have lost their money(in short, the normal procedure). It's much less expensive this way and you get rid of the banks who put us in this mess in the first place, preventing them from pulling this same trick again. Healthy banks would have been rewarded and if more banks had been needed, you could create a public bank with the money you didn't use on the bailouts making sure the benefits from this new bank gets directly to the taxpayer(this bank would have only been for lending/depositing avoiding the mess in the markets).Edited by Son, : No reason given.

But the bigger problem is that the very same banks that have been saved are using the money from the bailouts to lobby and prevent reform. Short of some kind of reset, I can't see how the situation can eventually get better. If we let those banks do their business as usual, the collapse you fear will still happen and will be much worse as the system get more and more corrupted. The other solution would be to nationalize the banks but if the same politicians that have allowed the fraud are the ones in command of the nationalized banks, it won't do much good.Either the system is at risk of a domino effect that would collapse the economy because a few bad apples, but that would mean that the system was too unstable to start with and it would collapse anyway after a while no matter what we do(a bit like a building with bad fondations).
Or the system is so corrupted that a few failures would uncover the rest of the corruption and would result in a general failure, but in either cases, not changing the way the financial system works will make it only worse later on and we can't make a new system while wasting ressources trying to sustain the old and failed one.As for the customers of the banks, they will be reimbursed by the FDIC that gets its money from the selling of the failed bank's assets. You can find some informations n how it works on the FDIC site. Moreover, I've done some posts on this subject in a previous thread:
EvC Forum: Occupy Wall Street
In my first post, you can see that the FDIC doesn't take only the taxpayer's money to make the clients whole but the money they get from selling assets. The taxpayer's money is only used if the assets didn't allow the FDIC to recover all the money, but it still spends less money than outright bailing out the banks.Edited by Son, : No reason given.

Yes you are responsible for your own money. But if you are sold poisonous food through deceit, you have a right to complain about it. What the OWS is asking is that the same applies when people sell toxic financial products through lies and deceit. Capitalism should be about selling the better product at the more competitive price, not about who's the best at cheating others out of their money. Think about it, if financial products were known to be untrustworthy and everyone is trying to rip off the other, there would be no (or a very reduced) financial market and the global economy would shrink greatly, that's why there should be laws against this sort of behaviour and that they should be enforced the same way it already is for material products (i'm not only talking about the mortgages and student loans but also about shorting the products you advertise to your clients or the MF fiasco).Of course, when a bad loan is made while both parties had the same informations, both should eat the consequences (meaning no bailouts for either of them).
The essence of an healthy economy is one that is trustworthy, otherwise, exchanges become reduced and the economy goes down the drain. It seems you're advocating that everyone should be looking after himself, but imagine if there were no laws to control the products you buy, since there will always be a number of domains you can verify, would you be able to live well if you can't trust that your next doctor won't rip you off? your next food seller? your next car seller? How would you make competitivity work when you can't compare the products because of the opacity of the system?

Well, I thought you were using the Internet but it seems that was a wrong assumption. Are you a psychic of some kind? Can you read my thought? If you want to prove it, just tell me where I was born.