A shorthand way of thinking about the decision to bail US banks rather than let them fail is to consider that there are 311 million people in the United States. Of these, 64 percent are aged 16 or over; about 158 million people work. Seventy-two percent of the working population live paycheck to paycheck, have few if any savings, and would have trouble raising $2000 on short notice. There are, as far as we can tell, about 70 million handguns in the United States. So what would happen if there was no money in the ATMs and no paychecks were being paid out? That was the fear. But what was the reality? Was the US financial system, comprising shadow banks, opaque instruments, bad risk models, and flawed blueprints, actually too big to fail?

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 143