Seems extreme...

-----
Many commentators have suggestions for Barack Obama on what should be his first meeting at the White House. Here is mine: Mr. Obama and his economic team should convene the 300 leading bank presidents in the East Room and the president should say to each one of them something like this:

“Ladies and gentlemen, this crisis started with you, the bankers, engaging in reckless practices, and it will only end when we clean up your mess and start afresh. The banking system is the heart of our economy. It pumps blood to our industrial muscles, and right now it’s not pumping. We all know that in the past six months you’ve gone from one extreme to another. You’ve gone from lending money to anyone who could fog up a knife to now treating all potential borrowers, no matter how healthy, as bankrupt until proven innocent. And, therefore, you’re either not lending to them or lending under such onerous terms that the economy can’t get any liftoff. No amount of stimulus will work without a healthy banking system.

“So here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to unclog the arteries. My banking experts have analyzed each of your balance sheets. You will tell us if we’re right. Those of you who are insolvent, we will nationalize and shut down. We will auction off your viable assets and will hold the toxic ones in a government reconstruction fund and sell them later when the market rebounds. Those of you who are weak will be merged. And those of you who are strong will receive added capital for your balance sheets, after you write down all your remaining toxic waste. I am not going to continue rewarding the losers and dimwits amongst you with handouts.”

Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy:

In recent years, whenever other countries — Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea or Mexico — got themselves into an economic crisis, we lectured them about how they had to adopt 'shock therapy'.

But now that we are the ones in crisis and in need of shock therapy, everyone is preaching gradualism.

Dr. King, in 1963:

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Recently:

It’s hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

And from 2007:

Fortune: And what happens next?

Bird: Well, then, this debt, this mortgage, this debt, is taken, bought by a bank and packaged together on Wall Street with a lot of other, similar debts.

Fortune: Without going into much detail about what is actually --

Bird: -- Without going into any detail, no, it's far too boring.

Bird: And so, this is put into a package of debt, and then it's moved onto Wall Street, and then, this ... it's extraordinary what happens then ... Somehow, this package of dodgy debts stops being a package of dodgy debts and starts being what we call a structured investment vehicle.