NEW YORK: If the U.S. government moves ahead with a plan to take ownership stakes in American banks, as seems likely, it would be an exceptional step - but not an unprecedented one.
The United States has a culture that celebrates laissez-faire capitalism as the economic ideal, but the practice is sometimes different. Over the past century, the U.S. government has nationalized railways, coal mines and steel mills, and it has even taken a controlling interest in banks when that was deemed to be in the national interest.
The corporate wards of the state typically have been returned to private hands after short, sometimes fleeting, stretches under government stewardship.
Finance experts say that having Washington take stakes in U.S. banks now - like government interventions in the past - would be a promising step in addressing an economic emergency. The plan being weighed by the Treasury Department, they say, could supply banks with sorely needed capital and help restore confidence in financial markets. Across Europe, governments rolled out similar initiatives Monday.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/13/business/nationalize.php
You're all being fooled as usual by this bailout shit.
The banks are going to try to offload their stupidities upon the U.S. taxpayer, and then return to making the same bad bets just to keep the stupidity party going.
Remember, anything that "finance experts" say is complete balderdash since the same "experts" claimed they didn't see the Great Crash of 2008 coming. There was every indicator that the system would crash, but too many people were financially dependent upon the gains made during the boom ... hence the massive conflicts of interest that we were supposedly so shocked to see in 2000 and 2001.
I've never seen so many U.S. citizens so happy to be placed into chains. The day for liberty and social progress grows darker with each passing month. We are only setting ourselves up for outright despotism. Some leader type will arise and play on all these fears and use the ever-increasing states of emergency and commit the final transformation into a tyranny. Bush was still just a prototype.
It's too bad more people don't recognize the fact that corporate shackles are just as binding as gov't ones.
People like Pink Slip