Movie: Hank - Five Years from the Brink

This Netflix documentary, by the guy who did the Metallica documentary, is basically a long interview with Hank Paulson about the financial crisis, intercut with period TV news of events as they happened.

I learned about it by reading this article:
http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/blog/2014/02/paulson-why-i-bailed-out-the-banks-and-what-would.html

I discovered this article by googling "what would have happened if we hadn't bailed out the banks?"

I've been thinking maybe a financial collapse is exactly what the economy needed.  Financial regulation was lax, government oversight was lax, investment banks were taking crazy risks because they knew the government would be there to guarantee their losses.  Firms like AIG made up "insurance" for the investment banks, and sold it, without any financial reserves to cover even minimal losses precisely because they knew Wall Street had become too big to fail.

Most americans' retirements depend on the stock market, so the government couldn't let Wall Street fail.  Although Wall Street is not the real American economy, it provides liquidity which keeps the real economy flowing.

So, Hank Paulson, and Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geitner became pawns of the financial sector, and did exactly what the financial sector knew they would do.  They bought them all new Christmas presents to replace the ones they'd broken.

And today, we're right back in the bubble.

And Trump wants to remove the few regulations that were implemented.

I tell you it scares the shit out of me.