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Bailouts are contrary to the spirit of capitalism.

Someone should explain that to what passes for capitalists nowadays.

You might call that crony capitalism. In non-western countries giving money to an official in return for favourable economic conditions is called a bribe, in the US, Canada and Europe it's called 'lobbying'.

The terms crony-capitalism, klepto-capitalism, and casino-capitalism are all very descriptive of the US economic system, which has become like a bad Yakov Smirnoff joke: "In America, bank robs you!"

So what's happened to the $85 billion a month ($1 trillion a year) that Ben Bernake has pumped into the banks in the last year, during the third round of quantitative easing (QE3)? "It all got bottled up in the banks, and essentially none of it ... got lent out." Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/12/17/251796694/year-in-numbers-the-...

QE as any kind of remedy is a farce. At best it has a kind of placebo effect on the stock market. In reality, with QE the Fed exchanges reserve deposits for treasury securities to execute policy aimed at lowering longer term rates which is supposed to increase demand for loans. Those reserve deposits are not lent out because reserve deposits are never lent out. Reserve deposits are used for interbank settlement.

Bailoutism.

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