Sure, the rich traders on the floor of the Chicago options exchange, the crowd cheering when CNBC's Rick Santelli went berserk this morning, are thrilled at the concept of ending the endless bailouts and letting the chips fall. Sure they want it to end. It raises taxes. It bails out the profligate. It is UNAMERICAN. It makes us lazy and stupid and unfair. Let everything fail. That's their attitude.
And I hate them for it. Look at what happened when we went with their course of action with Lehman Brothers. Look what happened. The world ended. We were so worried about moral hazard in helping out the "bad" guys that we forgot the hundreds of millions of people who were hurt by the Chicago trader method. We wrecked out system of finance. We have not recovered. We have resorted to having to cut principal to get out of the housing issue (as an alternative, check out my plan). We have had to try to stabilize a teetering banking system that would most surely collapse if these traders had their way, taking us through a moment that would be much worse than the Great Depression.
Which leads me to some sobering truths. The Chicago traders are worried about bailing out Citigroup (C - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Bank of America (BAC - commentary - Cramer's Take). They are worried about propping up the system. They want the chips to fall.
I am a student of history. Have they read any history? Have they? What do they think caused the Great Depression? How about an attitude just like theirs? Maybe they are all about betting the system is stronger this time. In this country, the Great Depression led to jobless, but the center did hold.
It did not hold in Europe. In the 1930s, Hitler came to power in part because of the total collapse of the financial system in Germany. He offered a way out. It was loved by the people. He was democratically elected.
The social unrest solidified the hold of Stalin and gave communism the boost it needed to take over a substantial part of the world.
This wasn't about whether the equivalent of Citigroup went to zero. It wasn't about the moral hazard.
It was about the real hazard: revolutions, genocide, social upheaval that obliterated the lives of millions. Fascism. In fact, I wish the ECB, which has been the worst (and the most Chicago-style) cared more about the rise of fascism than it does Weimar. Notice that when Germany said something about the need to be forceful in combating the problems, the euro went up and the dollar down. One of the reasons for the dramatic increase in gold is a fear that the euro could collapse from the lack of help by the ECB.
Ask yourself: Do you care about two or three trillion dollars being printed -- and it isn't all that inflationary considering the push downward from deflation -- if we avoid another World War II and the devastation leading up to it. ...
I hate to invoke class warfare. But for someone who was poor and lived in my car, I just feel different from these traders who, with their arrogance, just can wreck the social fabric of the country and the world. I think the bottom like on the Chicago approach is simple: the trains would run on time. ...
The world is not prepared for those defaults, because, once again, you are simply begging for a Great Depression.
