> So much confusion is caused by the inability to distinguish between "gift" and "loan".
QE4 was the better part of a trillion dollars. That much money moves through a system that is too complex and jargon filled for the layman to understand, and you want them to believe that there is nothing to see here?
1. The people on the other side of the bad loan, who aren't expected to pay back the money, are making bank by taking on silly levels of risk and then benefiting from the bailouts.
2. These loans aren't available to ordinary people or businesses because the terms would obviously put any individual far too far ahead. We can tell they are unfair just from that.
3. There isn't any reason to believe the loans are being paid back. Every time it looks like debts might get called in on aggregate, people claim financial crisis and there is another big round of lending.
> The problem with allowing banks to hard-fail is that imposes real, huge costs on customers even if the deposits are 100% covered
Yeah. People can't funnel their savings to incompetents and expect a good outcome. They should be very picky and reserved in deciding who to trust with their money, and there should not be coordinated giving of massive funds to a small pool of institutions who are regularly discovered to be wasting the resources they are entrusted with. This is one of the reasons we put up with the economy, it is supposed to keep power away from those sort of fools.
They need to be sent broke when they screw up badly. And people shouldn't be punished for saying "they're all untrustworthy, so I'm keeping money under my mattress".
> And prices going down exponentially is bad for investment, and precisely keeping prices the same forever is impossible
You've missed a bunch of options here though, namely the infinite number of functions that aren't exponential. Prices could be a random walk around an average, for example.
> Pension funds are more or less obliged to buy the safest assets they can?
I'm not following the story too closely, but the word I heard was the UK pension funds were getting margin called on their safe assets.