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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

If you print to buy equities, that’s reasonable, as long as you’re distributing the gains to citizens as UBI and not just buying to put a price floor on assets to maintain the wealth of a small subset of the country. So start buying up assets and fire up ACH transfers for citizens to get their dividends.

“Backstop America”, not just the wealthy. That’s the injustice people take issue with (and rightfully so). We’ve seen this before, we’ve seen how it played out, and the appetite for it to be repeated is likely not there.

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The appetite for bank bailouts wasn't there in 2008 either, people took issue with how banks paid massive bonuses during that time. Still it happened. We're doomed to repeat the mistake again

Bank bailouts weren’t the problem. Massive amount of fraud the banks allowed was the problem. They allowed people to borrow massive amounts of cash with little to no income. None of the senior execs were prosecuted.

To be clear, the fraud was banks packaging up subprime loans as prime and then dumping them on the secondary market to unsuspecting investors who thought they were getting quality mortgage bonds (I gloss over the nuance of tranches and CDOs for brevity).

This of course hurt homeowners who had loans made that never should’ve been made, but the root cause was investors not getting what they thought they were buying, and the resulting collapse in confidence. Homeowners were collateral damage, and as you mention, prosecutions were underwhelming (only 1 person was prosecuted).

I felt really bad about ordinary people that got clobberd and then just left to fend for themselves. Ordinary people don't buy houses as 'prudent investments'. They do it because that's where they are in life.

I thought it was the banks building derivatives on top of derivatives on top of derivatives and then paying off the ratings agencies.

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