Too Big To Fail

In just a few months, the “shape of Wall Street and the global financial system changed almost beyond recognition” (533). However, even wiring “tens of billions of dollars from Washington to Wall Street” did not “immediately bring an end to the chaos in the markets” (533). The bailout did not restore confidence and, in fact, had “the opposite effect” (533). In addition, there was another kind of “fallout”: a “national debate emerged about what the tumult in the financial industry meant for the future of capitalism, and about the government’s role in the economy, and whether that role had changed permanently” (533). These concerns were still “very much in the forefront of the national conversation” (533) a year later. A Republican president had also found himself in the “unaccustomed position of having to defend a hands-on approach” (533).

Despite the bailout, from the “vantage point of consumers and small-business owners,” the “credit markets were still malfunctioning” (534). Even with the cash infusions, major banks “continued to falter” (534). And the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch merger “became the subject of national controversy” in early 2009 when “BofA announced that it needed a new $20 billion bailout” (535). It later came out that Merrill had paid its employers “billions of dollars in bonuses” before the deal closed, leading to “public outrage” (535).