Good Read: How the Swedes Solved Their Financial Crisis

The New York Times has an excellent article that describes how Sweden dealt with a similar financial crisis to what we're facing today in America.

When the people of Sweden bailed out their struggling financial institutions, they mandated that they first write down their bad debt. The people also took equity in those institutions.

I have very little faith that our executive administration can execute a bailout without getting a bunch of friends rich. We, the people of the United States, should be outraged that our administration is proposing that we just throw money at the problem without imposing change.

Deregulation has failed. Giving money to a system that fails without changing it is just feeding fuel to another failure fire. I don't know what is required to make our financial systems work. Is it regulation?

If action needs to be taken now, what I would like to see is that we come to an agreement that the cost of a bailout is the recipients of the bailouts get to agree to whatever terms the congress comes up with, whether it be regulation, giving equity to the government, whatever. Additionally, I would love to impose a restriction on the recipients of the bailouts from using lobbyists and making campaign contributions.

That's just my thought.