04 Oct 2008
$700 billion bailout: Will it work?

The short answer is: No. That's the long answer, too.

What really, really galls me about this is the blame for the mess being placed on "the free market". Ha! We haven't had anything resembling a free market in this country since before the Civil War, over a century ago. And in point of fact, this most recent credit panic was caused by the massive government interventions of the past thirty years, and by the very regulation that this bill (and it's follow ups) seek to increase!

within the crainium pointed out this excellent letter detailing exactly what caused this crisis: An Open Letter to my Friends on the Left. Read the whole thing. It's not quite as cut and dried as the article suggests - but that's only because the level of state involvement and intervention goes even deeper than the author can fathom. But that doesn't detract from the main points: in a free market, this could not have happened, because institutions that attempted to behave the way some of these miscreant banks have behaved for over two decades would've been out of business in a few months.

The $700 billion bailout plan signed into law Friday may get banks to start lending to each other again.

(link) [CNN.com]

09:35 /Politics | 2 comments | permanent link