Drake University economics professor Ismael Hossein-zadeh argues that the Bush/Obama administrations’ response to the financial meltdown is exactly the same as the one the administration of Herbert Hoover tried at the beginning of the Great Depression. Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to pour taxpayer money into the coffers of big banks to save them from bankruptcy because they were “too big to fail.” All this did was delay the inevitable. The Japanese made the same mistake in the 1990s. There is no reason to believe that the situation now is any different. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s latest rebranding of the massively expensive rescue plan is that it is a “private-public” partnership. What this really means is that taxpayer money is being used to acquire partial ownership of the banks, while the bankers themselves retain control of the way the money is used. Hossein-zadeh states that the only solution is to nationalize banks and then issue loans at reasonable rates, thereby unfreezing the credit market.