what #5 was all about:

When the bank that his dad started became insolvent, Mr. Spangler approached the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond about bailing it out via a loan of $65 million. The FRB should have been providing better oversight of the bank operations and there were some violations of banking regulations that went unchecked. When one of the execs asked Mr. Spangler to tell him why the FRB should help, he responded:

"Well, I wasn't there when Bank of North Carolina got in trouble, but you people were."

So, Mr. Spangler was asking for help and justifying his request because of poor regulatory oversight. I admit to having mixed feelings about government solutions: on the one hand, market forces should fix problems and prevent recurrence through self-regulation; on the other hand, the government has an obligation to protect people, especially the uninformed and uneducated. In this case, the bank paid back the loan from the Fed.

There could be some parallels between this request and the current government bailout. Philip has written some posts on this topic including Fixing the Foreclosure Crisis. Again, I have mixed feelings about government solutions: on the one hand, borrowers may not have been fully informed about the ramifications of their loans; on the other hand, borrowers and banks will never learn to make changes if there are no consequences for their actions.

At the time that I was writing this post, I was still wrestling with what I thought was right and still am actually but this seems like a great time to insert another business lesson: Hold people accountable for their actions.