Kevin Walmsley

Pinning the Blame on the House Republicans

Last I checked, it isn't the job of the US Treasury to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to make good the losses on the balance sheets of Wall Street banks. All these bailouts have done is transfer default risk to the taxpayer, from the investors in the equities and the bonds.

We should have wiped them out, and found real market pricing on the avalanche of crummy paper these crummy banks have on their sheets. Instead we've thrown good money after bad, with the added privilege of getting to pay it back over the next 30 years via higher taxes and lower standards of living. And if the Congressional Republicans tried to stand athwart these developments, then we need more like them, not less.