Documentary film Movie Review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Documentary film - Movie Review Example I thought that Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson were correct in wanting to prevent institutions such as Behr Sterns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Lehman Brothers from going bankrupt. It appeared that if one financial institution was allowed to fail than a domino effect would begin to occur. In many cases, that did begin to happen when there was a refusal to bail out Lehman Brothers. When Lehman Brothers failed, it froze a lot of money for banks to lend out for short-term loans, which in effect halted a lot of the commerce that occurs within the country on a daily basis. The compromise of preventing Behr Stern from going bankrupt by selling their stock shares off to JP Morgan for $2 per share seemed like an extreme measure initially. However after some thought, it was probably the best option for both the company, the economy and the Federal Reserve. While all parties wanted to avoid adverse effects of Behr Stern going bankrupt, selling off the shares for such a low price definitely sent a message that this type of assistance from the Federal Reserve to fix these types of faulty business practices would come with consequences. There was also a lot of criticism towards the idea of giving capital injections to bail out large institutions, such as giving $80 billion to AIG to prevent them from going bankrupt or covering the $30 billion in toxic assets to Behr Stern. I understand the arguments against the idea, however I do not think that some of the arguments were made on fact and were made more on political principle. For example, many in Congress did not want to support the bill to give money to bail out the financial companies because they felt it went against the idea of free and open markets. While giving money to private companies did go against the idea of a free market economy, there were many experts and evidence showing that a bailout