It's been hard to avoid hearing about the Fannie-Mae/Freddie-Mac debacle, and how our congresscritters are planning to bail them out. "It'll be the end of the world" they say, "too big to be allowed to fail," they say.
I say horseshit.
There was a wonderful quote on NPR this morning which talked about the inherent impropriety of corporations where you have "Privatized profits and socialized losses."
If we -- you and I the American taxpayers -- are going to be bailing out these two giants, who've been passing along corporate profits to shareholders for years instead of building up the capital reserves they needed then the shareholder interests are immediately forfeit.
But in reality. I'm all in favor of letting them fail. Yeah, it might have some repercussions. Yeah, the corporations in question will crap themselves hard and all that. But how many private entities are we -- the voting taxpayer -- going to allow to make really really phenomenally stupid business decisions, and then have us pick up the tab for them? We do it with the airlines, we've been doing it left and right with mortgage companies, and now we're talking about doing it to the tune of billions of dollars.
No. You made your bed, now lie in it. And maybe the next generation of investors will learn to research better when they invest their money in companies with unsound business practices.
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