Or let them die and spend our efforts helping main street instead of Wall Street. Of course that would require a shift of priorities away from saving those who caused the mess.
The priority seems to be keeping firms solvent in spite of horrible stupidity and decades of rent seeking behavior.
This isn't capitalism it's a game that lets the powerful win over and over again. True capitalism has firm failure and creative destruction.
"the useful bits that remain." Yeah, a bunch of well-financed speculators will buy those foreclosed properties for pennies on the dollar and profit from the other end of that as well. And don't forget, for every dollar that was long on a swap, someone was short and made a damn killing. It's not like that those 30 year US notes were bought back by the government to decrease USD circulation.[2]
I'm right there with you though on your second and third assertions. (Though, on an optimistic note, more companies seem to be side-stepping the standard monopolistic 'approach the standard set of IBs to underwrite your IPO and give them 6% since they're the only ones who have the Rolodex to call up John, his old buddy from Wharton, or Grant his golfing buddy')
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[0] And let's not forget, banks around the world fixed LIBOR for years to fatten up their bonus. There are the equivalent of IRC chats admitted to evidence from a whistle-blower (immunity for amnesty) where Trader A would say "can you plz make sure that __ doesn't go above __ for 2 days? ive got <a position worth about 300 million USD> in <some ISDA product> deep, it'd rly help.. if you can make this work I'll get you whatever you need 50k..100k". (It's been a while since I read the transcripts, but that's the lexicon in which they spoke, and how the transactions were structured internally amongst what amounts to a group of ~100 people. With more or less complete control for the overnight rates for the entire world, they were gaming the system at magnitude so large where kickbacks between other agents would treat 50k and 100k EUR as interchangable.)
[1] Basically every single person from the buyer, to the broker at the local bank who altered the risk profile so he could post more loans for his $500 closing bonus, to the broker who locked the loans and bundled them up into CDOs for vast amounts, to every quant with a PhD and a seat at ISDA who concocted tranching MBS', to every trader who made a risky trade -- until the house of cards fell -- was at fault. Some certainly harmed more than others.
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WCURCIR I think that's M2, but par for the course