Gandall:
Nationalization (by whatever name in deference to the US political culture) would be widely welcomed. The banks need to be seized and rrestructured and their books opened and assets managed in the public interest. The dithering behaviour of the Obama administration is most commonly misdiagnosed by Wolf and others as "timidity" whereas in fact it is rooted in ideology. The torturous and complex half-measures involving lavish handouts to failing banks are recklessly wasteful and desperate attempts to stave off nationalization, increasingly seen as inevitable by elite opinion, including on the right. Gulick:
While there is an emerging elite consensus that some form of bank nationalization (by another name perhaps?) is desirable or at least inevitable, I'm not sure popular opinion is on the same page. Forgive me my fascination with "right-wing populism" (for lack of a better term), but is there not a large paleo-libertarian constituency out there that regards taxpayer giveaways to Wall Street and nationalization with public oversight not as stark ideological alternatives, but rather as two related species of the genus "socialism" (i.e., political manipulation of the magical market, at an extreme for the illegitimate enrichment of unpatriotic/foreign "money interests") and prefer to just watch the banks fail without any kind of government rescue?
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