ON BAILOUT: the parable of helping your gambling child...

[yurbud]

Imagine you had a kid who had been acting oddly and hanging out with the wrong crowd, and he finally admits he has a gambling problem. He says he needs your help. He owes some mobsters money--a LOT of money, as much as your house is worth--and if you don't give it to him, he will be killed. Maybe the mobsters will even do a drive-by and end up shooting other members of your family.

You have no idea what to do in these situations, so you find psychologists who specialize in addictions, Dr. Geithner, Rubin, Summers, and Bernanke. They tell you that the first thing you MUST do is pay the gangsters for they really will kill your wayward son and maybe other members of the family.

This seems like odd advice because you know your son has burned through his college fund, every penny from the jobs he barely keeps, and the money his rich grandma left him when he died.

But the doctors have degrees and say they know how to cure addicts, so you mortgage your house, and give the money to your son. He doesn't even say thank you before he takes off.

The next morning, you find him with a black eye, asleep on the front lawn in his own vomit. When he stands up, he says he gambled away the money you gave him and needs more or the gangsters will kill him. This time he needs all your retirement money.

So you go back to the doctors, and they tell you that you must give him the money or the gangsters will surely kill your son. You cash out your retirement money, give it to your son, and again he gambles it away, and wakes up in his own vomit, even more in debt, more than you have made in your entire life.

You go to the doctors again, and they say before you can do anything else, you must repay the gangsters--but for the first time, you notice the doctors are wearing pinky rings and velour jogging suits, and in the other room you hear the whir of a roulette wheel, the clinking of glasses--and is that your son's voice, groaning in disappointment?!


At this point, what do you do?

A. indenture yourself to the doctor/mobsters
B. kill your son
C. kill your son and the doctor/mobsters
D. wonder if your wife had been fooling around with a doctor/mobster when she got pregnant with your son
E. find another doctor

There are some serious problems with this analogy. Wall Street is not our son. It is more like an annoying door to door salesman that comes in to demonstrate a vacuum and ends up evicting you from your house, so it would be no great loss if the gangsters shot him.

And everyone knew the doctors were gangsters from the start.