Yawn. When are you idiots going to figure out that this is an election year and sending the indexes lower into November is against party rules. Dumbass.
I just want companies to be responsible for their own reckless behavior. You cannot allow an entity to take leveraged risk and then tell them that everything is okay - we'll bail you out. What kind of behavior does that promote? Reckless behavior. What kind of behavior can we expect in the future? Personally, I think all of those entities that you listed above could fail and although it would be a rough ride, other entities would fill the void. I am not saying it wouldn't be difficult, but our financial system would could out stronger. Now the system is just on life support and is bending over backwards to insure that the weakest survive. It is ridiculous - just like your assertions that we can't survive without these proven-to-be stupid corporations.
Please tell me how our Economy survives without the financial intermediaries to facilitate CAPITAL FORMATION? What other "entities" would fill the void? Once again, I come back to the same question that you ( and others ) have failed to answer. Where does CAPITAL FORMATION come from to facilitate investment of capital to create new business, trade, and job growth? It's a pretty simple question, but for some reason you have chosen not to answer it.
You are acting as if I am saying all banks would go under. Other banks would fill this void of capital formation - is that not an answer to your question? Obviously not all of these financial institutions were as stupid as others. The strong survive, the weak should die.
You assume that there are banks out there that do not have these kinds of "securities" on their books. Like many here on ET, you severely underestimate the magnitude of what has occurred. What do you think happens to economic growth when the only patients left in the hospital still have "cancer"?
Then other financial entities will step in and make a killing. For example, I'm sure Berkshire Hathaway would be salivating at a piece of the action. The stupidest thing to do is to keep on doing what has proven not to work - i.e., give more money/bailouts to these idiots.
The Bear Stearns bailout in the end did nothing if you look at the performance of the financial stocks (i.e., XLF) from then until now. I am just guessing that the bailout of Freddie/Fannie will produce the same results. We're just throwing good money after bad, in a futile attempt to protect basically crap.
You are mistaken. JPM "back-stopping" Bear did do something. The fact of the matter is that there were counter-parties to Bear that were made whole. You keep forgetting that there are "others" on the other side of all of these mortgage transactions. These transactions are not transferable. But given your logic, it would be "protecting crap" if we were to make sure that counter-parties were made whole. Do you even have any idea of the magnitude of how many counter-parties are out there to these transactions?
I don't think I'm mistaken. The US financial system would have survived Bear going under naturally without mommy Fed coming to the rescue. This "too big to fail" crap is just insane - where are the penalties for stupidity? Sure wish the Fed bailed me out when times were tough.