Bailouts: Poorly negotiated necessity?

Check out an easy to follow and well written analogy that sizes up the bailouts:

How Good an Investment Were the Bailouts? | The Big Picture.

It is important to follow these things, even at a rudimentary level especially during an election.

Although the whole process left a bad taste in my mouth (I do like market forces), I concede the bailouts of the banks and auto companies were a necessity.

As bad as things are post bailout, life would have been a lot worse without them. If we allowed the utter collapse of the banking sector and the manufacturing sector (all the suppliers to the auto manufacturers), we’d be facing a much worse economy now.

So in the conclusion of the article:

Look, let me bottom line this for you. These accounts made extremely risky investments, at a time when no one else was willing to put up this kind of money. You put an enormous amount of capital up for very little returns.

Yeah, we (taxpayers) did put up hugely risky investments, but we did get something back in return… our economy.

But this part concerns me:

Your brokers failed to negotiate half decent deals – its as if they were working for the banks, not you. You should have been paid handsomely for this, and you are not even break even across most of this junk you bought.

Bailouts are one thing… sweetheart deals are another. If we’re going to bailout industries during times of unprecedented crisis, it has gotta hurt the people we’re bailing out.

People need to be fired and/or go to jail. Industries owe the taxpayers A LOT of money back. And governments should negotiate very very handsome deals for taxpayers. We deserve it.

And what’s more, the bailed-out industries need much tighter regulatory oversight to ensure the same situation doesn’t happen again. If you can’t manage your business responsibly, someone else needs to do it for you.

As I’ve said before, I supported the last bailout. But if we don’t learn anything from the experience, I won’t support the next one.