Funny & not funny news

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The Swedes, who pulled off a rapid recovery from their own banking crisis in the early 1990s, have a simple message for their American colleagues: Bite the bullet on nationalization.

Former Swedish officials, many of them from the more conservative, market-oriented side of the political spectrum there, say the only way to avoid that conundrum is for the U.S. government to be prepared to take full ownership - temporarily - of some big banks that once defined excellence in global finance.

Sweden did just that, carving off all the banking industry’s troubled assets into a so-called bad bank, where they could be sold off over time. With the banks effectively bankrupt, the government wiped out existing shareholders, but then instead of shutting the banks down it used the taxpayers’ funds to provide enough capital to allow the banks to resume normal lending.

Read full article at International Herald Tribune