Interesting opinion/suggestion from "A Tiny Revolution"

[Postman]

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/

Call On Me! Call On Me!
I know the answer!

The New York Times explains here how Sweden dealt with the early nineties collapse of a real estate bubble very similar to ours, but wonders why we're not following their advice:

Sweden took a different course than the one now being proposed by the United States Treasury. And Swedish officials say there are lessons from their own nightmare that Washington may be missing.
Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government...

The tumultuous events of the last few weeks have produced a lot of tight-lipped nods in Stockholm. Mr. Lundgren even made the rounds in New York in early September, explaining what the country did in the early 1990s.

A few American commentators have proposed that the United States government extract equity from banks as a price for their rescue. But it does not seem to be under serious consideration yet in the Bush administration or Congress.

The reason is not quite clear.


The reason is actually very clear: Sweden is a first world democracy, where the people at the top feel a sense of responsibility to the rest of society, and the rest of society has the power to hold them accountable. The United States is more and more like a third world kleptocracy, where the people in charge have no interest other than looting the country, and no one has the power to stop them.

—Jonathan Schwarz