Category: Banks

Commentary By Capitalism Betrayed’s Redleaf and Vigilante in MarketWatch today:
Forget regulation, just make the banks open their books.
By Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante
MINNEAPOLIS, (MarketWatch) — Sen. Dodd’s new and not-very-improved financial reform bill, like the House bill passed last December, is driven by two of the most cherished popular myths of the financial crisis. [...]

Tamny is always good but this is a great point “a vanilla loan is every bit the speculation that a risky trade is”

The single biggest reason the current proposals for financial reform are all either irrelevant or destructive is that they are based on a faulty premise: the banks got in trouble because they were [...]

How is it that one man can be so wrong, so often, about such obvious things. Here he takes up the mantra that of course we need a consumer financial protection agency. If the banks are not duping the gullible then “ why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers.” [...]

As readers of Panic know we are big fans of AEI scholar Peter Wallison so we were thrilled to get his reply to our post yesterday (which you can find below.)
Richard and Andy,
I was delighted that you saw the distinction I have been trying to make between creditors and managements. Too many in Congress and [...]

This is among the most sober and well-argued pieces we have seen on the flaws of the administration’s financial reform proposals. We thought we might end up disagreeing more strongly when Wallison pulled out the old chestnut of the “moral hazard” supposedly created by too-big-to-fail. We have always been skeptical of the moral hazard explanation [...]

One of the most-read pieces in the financial press this week is Joseph Stiglitz’s interview with Forbes. He starts off just right, making the point that no commentator other than the humble authors of Panic have made: the essence of the crisis was the attempt to have capitalism without ownership, or without strong ownership.  That’s [...]

If free market types are to grapple effectively with the late crisis, they need to get one thing clear in their heads: The mega banks are not free market institutions. They are agencies of the government.
Creating and maintaining the currency is a core function of government, laid out right in the Constitution (c.f. “and regulate [...]

Learn more and read our editorial at The Huffington Post.

The Brits let the cat out of Obama’s bag. How quickly the  they have dropped the pretense that the bank tax is about anything but raising money from a politically unpopular group. We especially love the quote from PM Brown who argues a bank tax is necessary to make sure the “contribution banks make to [...]