We think Geithner et al are wrong and that unemployment will decline substantially this year. Both theory and experience argue business investment not consumer spending is the essential driver of recovery. Now that most businesses of significant size can borrow again investments that have been postponed for almost two years now have to come soon.
If [...]
Sorkin has the politics of this exactly right
Arguing over the street address of the consumer financial protection agency makes the GOP look dumb and on the take. (Sort of like real life.) There are really principled and therefor persuasive arguments against a consumer agency, like “consumer protection” in the form of forcing banks to make [...]
The whitewash of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has to be numbered among the most successful spin operations of our time. Within days of the market collapse in September ‘08, both Senator Dodd and Representative Frank were marching stooges up to Capitol Hill to testify that Fannie and Freddie—virtually run by the congressional committees chaired [...]
Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante column that appeared on RealClearMarkets.
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. [...]
The good side of Soros—and CDS
He’s obnoxious politically but you have to love a guy who has done so much over the years to expose sovereign financial finagling and make money doing it.
Predictably the governments of the world are taking seriously the idea of regulating CDS, now that these lie-detectors of the financial world are [...]
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 [...]