Originally posted by Eurisko2012
IF the stimulus worked then it would be self-evident.
I think the chart is pretty self-evident.
Originally posted by WatchRider
As a libertarian I say wall street should of gone to the wall.
I tend to agree with you, as I'm "part Libertarian".
If I think only about myself (my husband and I), we were and are in fine shape to withstand
a Wall Street meltdown. But if I think about the whole country and how many negative repercussions there would have been to our whole financial
system, then I'm not so sure it was the wrong thing to do.
This is the Bloomberg Index right around the time Lehman failed and was "saved" by us.
We thought Sept 11th made a big impact... It's nothing
compared to the Lehman failure.
Here’s Sterling’s graph of the behavior of the Bloomberg index, in which the remarkable character of events following September 12 is pretty
striking.
Even if the Lehman failure is agreed to as a definitive event, it is not clear to me that this establishes that all would have been fine if the Fed
had only bailed out Lehman as they had Bear Stearns and AIG before. That question is inherently and unavoidably counterfactual. We can’t know– and
decision-makers at the time couldn’t know– which domino might have been next to fall had this one been propped up.
Consequences
Americans don't reward failure and yet your leaders broke one of the cardinal rules by bailing out those parasites.
I agree. If we look at the situation without looking at any other factors or consequences, then it's easy to see that we shouldn't have rewarded the
failure of these companies. But the government HAD to consider the effect that allowing the failure would have on the entire country and the world. If
we hadn't bailed out these companies, banks and Wall St., how many people would have lost their homes? Their jobs? From people I've talked to, NONE
are in the position that my husband and I are in and could have weathered a complete market crash. NONE. They all have mortgages, credit, jobs that
depend on the market doing well, etc. The domino effect could have wiped out SO many people.
It's a hard position to take, because I DO hate it so much, but I can understand why the bailouts had to happen. I contacted my representatives so
many times to say that I was against it. But after the fact, I've got to say that I don't see how the country could have survived otherwise.
I think this will cause you long-term damage that you'll never quite recover from.
You may be right.
But we will never know how things would have been different if we hadn't done what we did.
(Never mind - It's ashes from an Ash Wednesday service) 
