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.
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.