[CaptainCrunch]

In a pure market society, your right bailouts don't happen, and companies survive or not based on their own actions.

However in this case would the American's have been better off finacially and employment wise if one of the big automanufacturers and some of the banks had utterly collapsed?

I'm not a fan of governments intervening in private industry, but poor and stupid management or not, it wouldn't have helped the Aemrican economy at all if they had thrown 10's of thousands or hundreds of thousand people out of work.

Plus if you look at the paybacks that the American Government received from the auto industry and the banking industries, it did seem to work out.