May You Live in Interesting Times

By George Weltman & Jim Lawrence

On Tuesday September 16, 2008, the US government blinked after the private sector failed to come up with the necessary funding for AIG given the lack of transparency and inability to get around the risk. By the weekend they’d thrown up their hands entirely. Following on the heels of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch’s sale to Bank of America and the very real spectre last Thursday that the financial markets were tottering on the brink of disaster, the US government had only one choice left a complete bailout of the finance business in an effort to cleanse the balance sheets of institutions, which had frittered away some trillion dollars of value over the past decade.

The consensus has been it was absolutely

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