Draw Breath

...would have been far preferable to taking the risk that the financial system would unravel entirely.

The Bush administration, sticking to its ideologue's guns, gets it dangerously wrong again.

Update: Ah: they were just saving up. Don't underestimate how catastrophic AIG's collapse would have been: not only do they insure most of the US's loans but they also have own most of America's commercial aircraft and have their fingers in many many pies. I think the state had to essentially nationalise the company not just in order to shore up the whole American (and global) economy but to shore up the financialised market system itself. Though it is worth pointing out that, approve of it or not, this sort of action puts to bed any talk of an adjustment: state intervention happens, as any student of regulation will say, when markets fail.