Fire Bernanke. Fire Geithner. No one who has ever worked at GS should ever be allowed to work in government again. They shouldn’t be allowed to show their face in public, but I’ll settle for barring them from government.
And when I say “fire,” I mean “arrest.”
If you’re too big to fail, you’re too big to exist.
Update: For what it’s worth, as a non-economist, I think the Fed did the right thing in not letting the world economy collapse into a true second Great Depression. But if you’re the lender of last resort, you ought to make profit on the risk you’re accepting, you ought to use the opportunity to escort the thieves from the temple, and you ought to change the rules so that it can’t happen again. Take this opportunity to re-institute Glass-Seagal, sic the anti-trust division on all the big banks, and generally get agreements to restructure things so that this can’t happen again, and the scoundrels are not rewarded. And by “you”, I mean, we, the people, who are on the hook for the trillion dollar bailout, and will end up paying for it for years. It might be true that the banks have paid back those loans, but they’ve also taken the profits and given themselves huge bonuses.
Those ill-gotten bonuses and profits should have gone to the taxpayer who took the risk (whether they wanted to or not), and not to the bozos who caused the problem.
Talk about moral hazard. Or rather, don’t talk to me about moral hazard when we’re talking about a homeowner walking away from an underwater house. The banks would, and have, done so without looking back. But it’s just good business when they do it, and a “moral hazard” when the common folk do.