Some sort of bailout was absolutely necessary. We didn’t want a rerun of the bank collapse of 1929-32 when 10,000 banks failed. The implosion of the financial system led, in large part, to the Great Depression. We had to do something to prevent that from happening, we had to do something to prevent the credit machinery from imploding—to keep a crisis in confidence from getting completely out of control.Of course, if you’re the kind of person who wants to see the whole system come crashing down, you don’t want a bailout; you want to see everything fall apart and hope that you can pick up the pieces. I’m not that optimistic that “we”—whoever “we” are—can do that. I was not willing to risk throwing scores of millions of people out of work on a political bet, a very long political bet. And so I thought that some kind of bailout was absolutely necessary.