A Tale of Two Bailouts: Wall Street v. Detroit
Does anyone else find it a little head-scratching that Citi gets a $20 billion bailout over a weekend (without any plan to guarantee that we’re not going to be stuck holding a $300 billion bag if the share of the shitpile we just guaranteed doesn’t turn out to be worth a damn thing.) This after a week when Congress seemed to delight in playing chicken with Detroit, denying them a $25 billion loan and raking their executives over the coals for flying corporate jets.
Sure, Citi is too big to fail. But psychically, for America, so are GM and Ford. I honestly believe that letting either of the big-two fail would instill the same kind of bunker mentality on Main Street that Lehman Brothers created for the global financial industry.
See also: Naomi Klein’s RS story on the bailout, The New Trough