If the U.S. government were to hand checks for tens of billions of dollars to the domestic auto industry or the steel industry to help them survive, presumably it would be viewed as a form of protectionism. However, when the checks to the banking industry, for some reason the question of protectionism never arises.
The NYT had a front page story warning of the rise of protectionism. Remarkably, it makes no mention of the hundreds of billions of dollars that the U.S. government is paying to keep the financial industry afloat. All the claims about the inefficiencies of protectionism apply as much to banking as they do to the auto and steel sector (we can use the same graph for all three), however protectionism for the banks never seems to raise any concerns in the media.
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