Quote:
Originally Posted by Dude76
The weakness in your thinking is that "good actors" would have been wiped out too. MSFT a company with not 1 cent of debt could not survive without customers. No-one would survive it. If you think they would, you don't understand how intertwined the financial services business' are on one another, and how dependant all business' are on the financial services industry. You could not have stopped the dominos from toppling over. The collapse you keep on insisting on would have resulted in ZERO, which isn't good even if it happened in '08.
On principal everyone agrees with the idea that those who took the risk should pay for it, but when the cost of making them pay for it takes everything with them all the sudden any ration person doesn't want to live on principal alone.
Your talk of collapsing the entire financial system is just chest thumping talk. If you collapse the system what would you replace it with, and how are you prepared to handle that world? Can you survive without food, without fuel, without ammunition, without money, or without medical attention? And if you can survive without all that, can you defend yourself against 1000's of people who will kill you for what you have?
If you have gold and think you are safe because of that I have some news for you. It is a soft shiny metal that is not good for much of anything. It is only your belief that it is worth something that makes it so, just the same as the paper money in your pocket that you loath so much. If you only have a piece of paper that says you have gold then your no better off than any fool holding Lehman brothers stock. In your world whether you want to admit it or not possesion becomes 10/10ths of the law.
I'm sorry but even if we are heading into a great depression it is shorter and shallower than what your peddling.
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Trying to understand your thinking is difficult.
The fact that you can possibly think that
all economic activity would come to a
complete and total halt tells me that you have an extremely limited understanding of the economy -- and
productive people -- all around you.
I'll speculate that you're one of those "idiots" (like Paulson or Bernanke) who have
absolutely no understanding of the idea of people actually
living within their means.
I'm guessing that you only understand the concept of "borrow and spend" -- and subsequently think that a "freeze" in the
credit markets will somehow result in "all" economic activity stopping.
Well I have news for you, there are literally millions of Americans who do
not live with a "borrow and spend" mentality. Millions in this country live within their means; they save and invest
before they spend money.
Without the bailouts, the
irresponsible lifestyles of many (I suspect you are in that crowd) who "consume before they have produced" would have had to come to a screeching halt.
For the millions who
live within their means, things would certainly change as the economy shifted (because the "borrow and spend" crowd would no longer be significant actors in the economy), but generally, those who live by "producing
before they consume," would do OK.
The government's recent actions boil down to nothing more than irresponsible people being bailed out at the expense of the responsible (with the government effectively "stealing" the savings of the responsible through inflation of the money supply to pay for the bailouts.)
Taking from the productive to give to the nonproductive is
not the way to bring about any economic recovery.
The government's actions is only making things worse. The depression that is coming will be much worse than it would have been if the government would have just stepped aside and let the bankrupt businesses (and people) fail. A lot more of the healthy businesses (and productive people) will now fail because they have to pay to keep the losers "propped up" artificially.