[RottenHuman]

What you're completely ignoring is the consequences such bailouts have on the market dynamics[1]. It creates a massive morale hazard which can and will incentivize market actors to take part in risky behaviour. If you are seeking to stabilize the "free" market, you are not going to do it by rewarding the losers or picking the winners.

Failing is just as important aspect of a self-regulated system as is the price, since the government voided that mechanism since forever we have an entirely disrupted market perfectly conditioned for too-big-to-fail participants.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

[kbenson]

I think that depends entirely on whether you saw what happened as the government bailing out GM, or the government keeping an industry from collapsing, which just happened to by by taking the first major company of that industry to fail, and injecting capital. I don't think it would be wise to expect the government to bail GM or any other auto-maker out of a financial problem in all industry conditions and all market conditions. Investors that expect that will lose their money to investors that correctly assess all the preconditions required. I don't expect most investors to be so stupid as to think nothing bad can happen to their investment in a failing company because occasionally extreme measures are taken in extreme circumstances. At a bare minimum, they should recognize that even if a company is bailed out, that doesn't guarantee a positive return, just a theoretically less negative return than before.