As it stands, bailouts will reward the most risky investors and speculators, while passive investors, retirees, and taxpayers will end up bailing out these risk takers. Thus, for the finance sector, the Fed provides elasticity: fungible rules around banking, investing, taxation, and bailouts when things go bad. For the rest of the economy, and individuals, we get discipline: massive losses, austerity and cuts to social programs and public infrastructure, moralizing our individual failures as people, and continual indebtedness.

Lemon socialism is a pejorative term for a form of government intervention in which government subsidies go to weak or failing firms (lemons; see Lemon law), with the effective result that the government (and thus the taxpayer) absorbs part or all of the recipient’s losses. The term derives from the conception that in socialism the government may nationalize a company’s profits while leaving the company to pay its own losses, while in lemon socialism the company is allowed to keep its profits but its losses are shifted to the taxpayer.

So the imbalance: Why does the Fed continually save the financial industry every 10 years, but not any other industry? Why does the Fed create and spend 1.5T dollars to purchase worthless and arcane financial instruments, but never spend on public goods like housing, student education, public infrastructure