Should We Have Let Wall Street Go Bust?
Perspectives on the Much-Hated, Much-Attacked, and Much-Defended Great Bank Bailout of 2008
Unless we were very young or very oblivious, we remember the financial panic that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008. Wall Street ran to Washington and asked to be saved from further collapse, and, within a few weeks, Washington had obliged. Hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money went to the financial institutions—and the executives—of Wall Street. Today, despite legislation intended to curb some of the speculative excesses of Wall Street, many of the problems that led to the collapse of 2008 appear to have …
