Quote Originally Posted by JaggedEdge
As I understand it, we the tax payer, are share holders in this company. If our investment began before the initial investment we should try and save them. I believe however, they were a completely private company before the government invested out money into them; in that case, we should have let them fail. It's part of a free market.

Seeing as our money is now invested in them we should do everything in our power to get our money back.

*EDIT* Other than the above, I agree with you.
The ripple effects it would have sent throughout the global financial world would have been worse than 1929, and possibly worse than 1720. Basically, they did not have the liquidity to pay out $30 billion worth of claims at a single time frame.

Why might you ask? The assets they have were in majority, the SPMBS they insured against default. Once these defaults began to exponentially surface, the pool in which payments can be drawn against dried up as they were worth pennies on the dollar.

It would have bankrupted 10% of every financial institution in the world.