Sen. Markwayne Mullin tried to blame former President Barack Obama for Jeffrey Epstein‘s 2008 plea deal, despite Obama not being president at the time.
Mullin made the comments while being interviewed by Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. First, Tapper and Mullin debated over whether the attorney general has the ability to release documents related to the Epstein investigation, with Mullin insisting that only judges have the ability to make that information public and Tapper arguing that there is additional information that Attorney General Pam Bondi could — and has promised to — release, yet she has not done so.
Then Mullin made a bizarre claim that Epstein struck a deal in Florida in 2009, under President Obama. But that is factually incorrect, as Tapper pointed out.
That ‘not great’ response prevented the complete and imminent collapse of the entire global economy. I’m not sure what the phenomenon of discounting the much worse outcome is once it is avoided, but I’m pretty sure it has a name.
It’s the same phenomenon that has people say that the covid crisis was overblown and vaccination was unnecessary because it subsided on its own, ignoring the impact that billions of people getting vaccinated had.
That’s a bit hyperbolic. Certainly a lot of big players in the financial industry would not exist anymore and a lot of rich people would have gone bankrupt, but for the majority of people, it would not have looked much different than doing nothing.
What should have happened is, instead of giving free money to the banks, the bad loans should have been paid off through a forgiveness program. That would have saved both the banks and regular people and wouldn’t have given the banks cover to make up fraudulent liens to steal people’s homes.
Though it was one of the least responsible ways to save it: handing a blank check to the ones that made the bad gambles in the first place. They didn’t even have anyone go and look at what was being done with it. It might have been one of the biggest wealth transfers in history. Plus it set a precedent that the government will step in to limit risk, which encourages more of this shit.
Though at least they didn’t do the same to bail out the shortsellers that were getting squeezed for GME and those other meme stocks a few years back (which could have also broken the economy). There was fuckery, but it wasn’t “the taxpayers will pay your bills when you lose big while you proportionally pay less than most of them when you do win”.
They should have made any bank bailout contingent on nationalization. That was the big mistake.
Is your bank insolvent to the point that it needs emergency federal assistance? Is it so grand that letting your Tower of Babel collapse endangers the entire nation? Do we the taxpayers have a guns to ours heads here, forcing us to give out these bailouts? All to clean up the mess left behind by overpaid, overconfident, completely incompetent bank executives?
If so? Fine. A bailout will be given to protect the customers and the nation, but the existing shareholders are completely wiped out. The feds take ownership of the bank. They divide the accounts and remaining assets of the megabank up amongst a dozen smaller new banks it creates as a replacement for the failed giant. The Federal Reserve provides credit to the new banks as they get started. Eventually, when they stabilize, the government holds IPOs for the new banks and completely divests ownership of them.
THAT is how bank bailouts should work. This way, moral hazard is avoided, the government isn’t fleeced, and market consolidation is reversed all in one go.