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Wealthy insiders in banking and government determine which distressed corporations will live and which will die. Ex-Goldman Sachs execs get extra special treatment.
After berating European government for decades about their 'socialistic' support of their big corporations, American business/government now does the same.
Certain 'to big to fail' (ha ha) corporations were allowed to go on buying binges for distressed companies even though their balance sheets were flaky. Now same companies express surprise that acquired businesses were in worse financial than they realized. Please please big government, we need more monies from you or we may have to hurt more Americans. Adam Smith must be flipping in his grave.
And the worst thing is that Bank of America wasn't really hurting so badly that it needed help. They still have deep pockets.
All major banks are insolvent as this point. What they won't admit is the amount of credit-swap derivatives that are on there books. I believe when freddie/fannie along with Lehman went away, it triggered a ton of these debt-insurance contracts and that is what we are bailing out. Insurance contracts gone bad, that is why they won't mark them to market because we would then see they have no value because no one is going to by insurance that you owe on. Its a total loss.
this whole meltdown would probably discredit US-style free-market capitalism for a while. Remember when stories about Asian banks being insolvent filled every major news paper in the states, remember when cocky American executives, economists and analysts (I never understand why a bunch of 30 somethings with no experiences whatsoever in software development, semi-conductor industry, or media market get the nerve to tell Microsoft, IBM, Google or Time Warner how to do their business, and dimwit so called "investors" actually believe what they say.). The whole wall street is rotten to its very core. And the system is rigged to favor wall street bankers. Arthur Andersen collapsed along with Enron, yet companies like Moody and Standard Poor whose role in this far bigger mess is comparable to what Arthur Andersen did for Enron still live and issue their "credit" rate on everything from small companies to national government. Bush got away with lying to the nation by scapegoating CIA, credit rating companies didn't even bother to scapegoat anybody, yet no investigation is launched, nobody is arrested, no warrant is issued. How dare they? I suggest those ideologues who, with their astronomical level of delusion, still somehow believe the supposedly superior "market" economy over socialism. They should ask themselves how come "market" economy always need socialism to save their butt, and how come those supposedly inferior banks in those supposedly inferior socialist nations like Germany and Japan didn't REPEATEDLY require hundreds of billions of dollar of government money to live for another day?
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