It’s 2008 on steroids
Fire those printing presses up
Gold is heading upwards again 
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The prospectus for Fannie and Freddie paper explicitly said it was not backed by the “full faith and credit of the United States”. But, when those agencies were about to default, the drumbeat started for the government to make all the GSE paper good. Even Jim Jubak, one of the more reasonable financial talking heads, was burbling that, if the government didn’t make the GSE paper good, no-one would buy Treasury bonds. The government made the GSE paper good.
I would expect a bailout of the FDIC. Did anyone lose insured deposits when the FSLIC collapsed?
From Wiki:
Insolvency
In the 1980s, during the [savings and loan crisis, the FSLIC became insolvent. It was recapitalized with taxpayer money several times, with $15 billion in 1986 and $10.75 billion in 1987; however, by 1989 it was too insolvent to save. Pursuant to the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989, the FSLIC was abolished along with the FHLBB, and the FSLIC savings and loan deposit insurance responsibility was transferred to the FDIC. The FSLIC Resolution Fund was created to assume all the assets and liabilities of the FSLIC, which was to be funded by the Financing Corporation (FICO).
Of course, the US is much Shinier now. Maybe TPTB would decide that it is “good” for the Proles to lose their life savings?
Steve
Even the wealthy were impacted during the Great Depression. It wasn’t the suffering of the masses that bothered them, it was that their own economic fortunes were threatened. Even so, the die hard “anti-socialism” tribe of the R******n party carried the day with Hoover (he did some, but mostly tinkering around the edges) under FR came in and shut down the banks, tried to reenergize the economic with “stimulus” *(by another name) and so forth. Even then he was hampered by a reluctant USSC and opposition in Congress. Finally it was the ultimate stimulus of all time: the Second World War that pulled the US economy out of its funk and made it the dynamic powerhouse for the next half century.
The devastation of one’s own economic station has a way of clarifying the mind. At least it does now.
Economists of a certain stripe like to joke “You could hire people to dig holes and hire more people to fill in the holes, but what would you have?” As it turns out, we hired people to build bombs, then drop bombs, then rebuild cities - and we got an economy the likes of which the world has never seen before.
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Remember Goldstein’s book? The objective of the forever war was to absorb excess production, so that everyone was kept employed.
Steve
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Or George Orwell in '1984"?
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The Goldstein book is in “1984”
Steve
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Why did Orwell use a more or less Jewish name for the leader?
adding
Some background
Every time I see a depiction of the daily “two minutes hate”, I think of the daily vilification of Muslims by the USian media, in the early 2000s.
iirc, there was some doubt, in “1984” whether Goldstein actually existed, but was rather a boogyman that the regime used to focus the mob’s hate, much like OBL was used by the USian regime. As some noted, in the early 2000, “1984” was not supposed to be a “how to” manual.
Steve
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You did not read the link?
Orwell had his own sort of love-hate relationship with all of it.
Kind of like a bigot mocking other bigots. He was a man of his time.