Sorry to play devil's advocate, but you have to be realistic, with or without a bailout the big, high-earning bankers aren't the ones who are going to pay! The people who will pay if there is no buyout are those ordinary people who own their own homes (or God forbid, who just want to get onto a reasonably stable housing ladder), or simply those people who took out perfectly legitimate loans through their high-street bank, etc.
Without a bailout, the rot will spread and will soon trickle down to the ordinary folks...
Sorry to say that! I should clarify - I'm not advocating that these bankers should get away scott-free, merely that preventing the bailout would not hurt them, merely the little people.
There's also the fact (and I realise that I'm wandering dangerously off point, so I'll stop after this) that at the end of the day, we WANT entrepreneurs and banks to take risks (it's good for enterprise and therefore good for the economy as a whole) - if people are penalised too strongly for taking these risks, you run a real risk of disinclining existing entrepreneurs or new ones from making investments, which is something that no economy needs at this present time. It's a difficult balancing act, and I don't envy those people having to weigh up the options.
It's just that in this case, the safeguards on the financial markets weren't stringent enough and the risks have gotten out of hand. In a very bad way. Okay, I've finished playing Devils advocate...
Inscrutable