Quote Originally Posted by Lyle View Post
I don't know if this is just me but I find it a bit scary that if the government owns the banks then whoever gets elected owns the banks and then we have a whole new level of fear..."If the Republicans run the banks the X is going to happen"...."If the Democrats run the banks then Y willl happen" etc etc etc.

The idea behind our economy is that eventually we have to pay for goods and services and the faster we just let things be the faster we get back to people getting back to normal which means spending like normal and maybe we have to wait a while before the lending comes back to normal but I would rather the economic environment adapt than the government just go in and start running things.
If you "let things be" the entire financial system will collapse. If government hadn't stepped in to bail out the banks with the KLGFSRP we'd already be back to the barter system. It may well work perfectly well in North Carolina but in the rest of the world we prefer using hard currency to settle our transactions. I don't want to have to carry round half a pig or a bushel of whatever it is you people make bushels out of to buy something I want.

Bank lending and business investment have come to a standstill. Consumer spending is dropping off a cliff and as more businesses are unable to get credit from the non-lending banks they'll lay more people off, which obviously cuts consumer spending. Business then slashes payroll even more and generally cuts costs so they can cut their prices to attract spending, but as they keep cutting prices consumers wait to spend as they know prices will fall further. We call this "deflation" and it's what happened from 1930 onwards to cause the Great Depression. That's why the government is spending money right now -- nobody else is, and if somebody doesn't keep spending the economy will fall into a deflationary death spiral.

So taking all this into account do you still want the government to just back off and let the market sort itself out? Or would you support at least making an attempt to avoid Depression?