It is the mere fact that the government didn’t save Lehman Brothers that caused the 2008 panic, because the financial markets assumed the government would do so.
Would the world be better of if the US government had saved Lehman Brothers? Maybe in short run, but the crisis would have occurred anyway. Because financial institutions believed governments would always bail them out, their business models and risk models were berzerk. Financial institutions would lend money to anyone who could breathe, had a name and social security number, as satirized in the movie “The Big Short” where a family renting a home finds that the landlord had put the house under his dog´s name. Common business knowledge like lending money only to credit worthy borrowers was a practice of the past.
Solution
So the question is how do we solve this? How do we bring sanity back to the financial sector without making tax payers pay even more?
Well, it is not by creating thousands of new regulations, laws and an army of regulators, as they are being created now, only to result in more public expenditure. Financial institutions have their own armies of lawyers, accountants and lobbyists that can easily work their way around these