stdragon :
Just remember, banks are "too big to fail".
The fact they can't via the Gov propping them up is a good portion why the US is in the financial mess that it's in. The whole housing crisis in 2008 could have been, should have been in fact, the correction it needed to be. They played games with mortgage backed security, why did the tax payer get left holding the bag?
...something about complete collapse of the financial system plunging the modern world into the dark ages.
Remember that Congress first voted against the bailout, before they got the daylights scared out of them when they learned what would actually happen if more big banks failed. Credit default swaps were sort of like Dr. Strangelove's doomsday machine - not intentionally so, but nonetheless a form of mutually assured destruction. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say you have some reading to do.
I don't like the bailout, but faulting the bailout is misdiagnosing the problem. When a guy walks down a dark alley and hands over his wallet to a mugger, you don't blame him for handing over his wallet, but rather you go after the mugger and probably fault the guy for walking down the dark alley. So, focusing on the bailout is really just a trick used to distract us from focusing on the necessary financial reforms, which might not have gone far enough, and some of which have recently been rolled back.
Anyway, I'm sort of glad for the recent focus on the trade deficit, as that was just adding fuel to the fire created by the financialization of mortgages. The money that left US shores had to come back in some form, in order to keep the whole thing going. So, one place it went was into financial products like mortgage-backed securities, which were created and given fictional values with the aid of unregulated insurance policies called credit default swaps. But CDS' weren't
only used for that purpose...
(I can rant, too)