Moral Hazard requires failing banks to, well, fail …

The quicker we put failing banks into receivership — temporary nationalisation if you will — the quicker they can be restructured to put the working pieces back into play, at the least cost to the taxpayer. Regretfully, but quite correctly, the bank’s shareholders will, and should, lose their shirts. Because unless they suffer the pain of their bad investments banks will not regulate themselves from behaving badly again — and without a hefty amount of self regulation banks will not be able to attract much capital in the future. Out of that suffering will come some good. Any other way rewards the greedy banks, their unquestioning investors and their complacent employees at the expense of the long suffering taxpayer, it puts the country deeper into debt and insures an undisciplined industry from the moral hazard of their own mistakes. Unacceptable.