Suing Banks Is Next Best to Letting Them Fail

``The Vietnam War gave us the expression, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." The same kind of thinking might help explain the U.S. bank rescues of 2008: We had to save the banks in order to sue them... Congress could have let those companies die, as they deserved to. It didn't, though. So now the inevitable claims are working their way through the courts. The government's roles as both a referee and a player in the financial markets remain as conflated as ever. ''