Moore is cluelessly deranged regarding bailouts, the Federal Reserve and capitalism. The problem is not unfettered capitalism; the problem is that favored industries were spared from the market by government assistance.
Capitalism does NOT exist on Wall Street.
Every single over-leveraged, fraudulent financial institution that was saved by TARP and Bernanke and Geithner's trillions in stealth bailouts should have been allowed to fail. We are talking about investment banks, after all, not your grandmother's church choir.
Investment banks take risks by nature. And they should face dissolution and bankruptcy when those bets don't work out.
We've said it from the beginning, against the ignorant and misinformed current of status-quo talking heads and wannabe financial experts, including Inside Job director Charles Ferguson and over-hyped author Ellen Brown, allowing Lehman Brothers to fail was the only thing Bernanke and Paulson ever got right.
The market spoke and the government didn't intervene. That is capitalism. And not coincidentally we learned later that Lehman was an over-leveraged cesspool of fraud and criminal malfeasance with a $600 billion crater in its balance sheet, despite assurances from Dick Fuld that $20 billion from taxpayers would have saved the company. Complete and utter nonsense. And there is little reason to believe that Lehman's fraudulent financials were any different than what we would have found at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup or Bank of America.
Each and every major investment bank was then, and to this day, remains MASSIVELY insolvent. It's not even a close call - with 30:1 leverage on inadequate capital, assets need only decline 4% in value to wipe out the balance sheet, and assets have declined 30-40% on average. We are talking about insolvency by orders of magnitude.
Only in the Bernanke-Geithner, CNBC-promoted, 'can-kicking' world of purple unicorns and psychedelic money printing, can any other conclusion be reached.
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In just 15 seconds this clip perfectly encapsulates the madness of bailing out Wall Street millionaires and billionaires.