Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Economics Explained" channel.

@p2p104 One of the great failings of the Great Recession was that none of the bankers involved went to prison. Until the C level executives have to worry about prison time from these sorts of shenanigans, it'll keep happening as it's not exactly the best and the brightest that wind up running banks.
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The short answer is corruption. Banks were allowed to gamble with money deposited by despositers above and beyond the typical mix of mortgages and loans. Up until relatively recently there had been laws on the books requiring that banking and investing activities be walled off from each other so that the FDIC wasn't on the hook for the much riskier bets involved with the stock market. The rest of the answer is that it was a decision to bail out the banks rather than simply buy up all the trouble assets and start cancelling out the various credit default swaps that were threatening to swamp the entire world's economy. It would have been far more effective than what we ultimately did. (Although it was still a massive improvement over what was done during the great depression, so progress)
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@stevencooper4422 Any metal that's rare enough to be useful as a standard is also rare enough to not be very helpful in the long run. The rarity of the metal is what makes it valuable enough to be able to use as a backing for the currency, it also means that if you've got much growth that you're eventually going to run into issues with there not being enough of it for everybody to have the money that they've earned. At which point, you've got basically the same problem we've got with more "currency" in circulation than we really have with one dollar being potentially owed to several people. As long as only one of them wants it at any given time, there's no problem, but if more than one of them want it at the same time, there are issues.
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@nestam6844 We won't get hyperinflation. The elites will see to it that regular people are taxed to remove most of the extra money. That's what taxes are for, it's how the government removes excess money supply. The other option is arranged insurrection and seizing funds from the oligarchs that got most of the printed money as the politicians are too corrupt to tax the rich.
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Absolutely, no institution, with the exception of the government, should ever be that large. And even with the government, there's a reason why so many large nations use some form of federalism where there's a national government and smaller local governments. It greatly reduces the concentration of governance into one body. Even China with it's concentrated governance in one party, still has smaller government offices spread through the country and they aren't always in lock step with the official CCP.
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@JohnnyCash101 They were mostly smaller institutions though that were taken over by the FDIC before they had a chance to outright fail. Apart from Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, it was mostly smaller banks that lacked the capitalization to survive the mandated stress tests that were taken over.
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@BOSSDONMAN There were other alternatives, for example simply buying up all the troubled assets and then going in with a hatchet and tearing up these "too big to fail" financial companies into a larger number of companies.The problem is that the elites didn't want that in recent precedence having more or less killed antitrust regulations that would have reduced the likelihood of this happening.
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To an extent, inequality is a good thing, it helps drive innovation. The problems come when the powerful can buy political influence and use that influence to avoid having to share any of that with the people doing the work. The existence of billionaires is less of an issue if everybody is fed, housed and has a decent standard of living.
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Of course, you can, a simple graduated tax system with some of the money taxed from the top given to those at the bottom to subsidize a basic standard of living would do just that. It would disincentivize the hoarding of wealth and opportunity, while giving a boost to those at the bottom. This would allow them to have the room to try and make a go at things that would otherwise be too risky. Income inequality became a problem in the US in large part due to inadequate taxation of those with money.
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@ragingnep Of course, but when a small portion of the population controls such a large chunk of the wealth, it is a massive problem. If it's just everybody advocating for things that benefit them personally, things would tend to even out over time.
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I fail to see an inherent problem with that, the only way around that is to also prohibit the government from issuing bonds.
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The going up is only reall a problem because our taxation and regulatory policies encourage the wealthy to stockpile money rather than allowing workers to share in the growth.
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So? Gold has significant issues, not the least of which is that you can't necessarily conjure up enough to cover the growth in the economy forever.
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@benjaminchen8857 I haven't bothered to watch the video yet, but it looks like an method is being missed. Rather than repoing the money back, it could be taxed from the wealthiest people. In America, the wealthy don't generally pay the taxes they owe and they have so much money that even if they did tax back the money that we've been spending, they'd still be ridiculously wealthy. Bezos alone could afford to solve homelessness in America and still be worth over a hundred billion dollars.
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