http://lancasteronline.com/blogs/smartremarks/2011/12/01/making-you-too-big-to-fail/">Smart Remarks:
You know, I’ve got an idea. Instead of throwing more money down the big bank sinkhole, why don’t we try something different?
Why don’t we give some money to the people for a change?
Why doesn’t the Federal Reserve create a few billion with those computer keystrokes, sent it over to Treasury, which then cuts a check to every American citizen for, say, a measly $5,000? Or how about $10,000? And if you want to be all sticky-picky about it, make it low-cost loans, at the rates the banks get. The Fed’s discount window rate is now 0.75 percent, but Denninger thinks it’ll go down to the new swap rate line, which is 0.5 percent.
So how about that: The gub’mint makes available, to each an every American citizen
REGARDLESS OF CREDIT RATING (because we know that the actual financial condition of the Too Big to Fail Banks is irrelevant as to whether they get their money or not), a loan of $10,000 at 0.5 percent.
Think of what that would do for the economy.
You take that money and immediately pay off your credit card debt, which is running you – what, 18 percent?
You might pay off your car or other loans where your rate is far higher than this
CONSUMER discount rate. And then you got 10 years to pay it back, but because the interest rate is so low, you wind up paying not much more than the principal. And no front-loading it either, like a mortgage.
Sure, sure, your average idiot American would instead take the money and go buy a new HDTV. Lots of people would never be able to pay it back.
But what assurances do we have that all this nearly-free money being given to basically every financial institution on the globe will be paid back?
They’re too big to fail? No. How about,
YOU are too big to fail. The American consumer is too big to fail because once the American consumer fails, the economy is dead, kaput. And not just the American economy – as the consumer of last resort, our ability to consume powers China, powers the world.
You enhance that power to consume, growth begins anew. You restrict it – with austerity measures while at the same time giving ever more money to the financial institutions – growth will remain anemic, if it exists at all.