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What a laugh.
How much of the public's money should we give these losers is the only "plan" we need.
http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2009/02/oka_...
Keep lying if you want to, alphie, about the free market when government intervention in the market caused the crisis, but don't expect people with brains to believe you.
Color me surprised.
The "conservative" movement in this country has turned into a freak show reality program where the wealthy folks who run it compete to see which of them can get you guys to swallow the weirdest "facts."
Remember when your leader Rush tried to push the "it's Obama's recession" meme back in November and got laughed at even by the gullible right?
There may be hope for you guys yet.
Do you deny the government was encouraging the housing bubble?
You can usually tell the democrats by how much they lie (online and off). Alphie, you have good company with Madoff and Standford (two big-time democrats).
Do you also believe the government was behind 9/11?
Just checking...
Will's liberaltarian project is destined to fail because liberals are like retarded 3 year olds. They should not be taken seriously.
I think this is simple proof that nothing satisfies.
(I read a few articles last night suggesting that this might not be such a bad point, in fact, to watch a little, to see what the trends actually are.)
It says focus on the one thing you (as in Obama) claim is important. As opposed to claiming totally unrelated things are all important.
OH! It's that he shouldn't spend any time on things you are less closely aligned with him on!
His administration should be clear about what they are doing when it comes to banks. If they are waiting for the rest of Q1 to unfold, then say that. If they don't have a clue, then say that. All the uncertainty has been causing big problems.
Are we talking about treasury appointments here? Because, so far as I know, there haven't been all that many to be stupidly obstructionist about. Aside from Geithner's rather flagrant tax-cheating but they ultimately -- and rather quickly -- let him slide on that one.
Have there been other Treasury or other appointments crucial to addressing the financial crisis that have been obstructed by conservatives for seemingly petty offenses?
(Note that I don't think it's all that petty to demand that those appointed to enforce our laws be able to demonstate compliance with those laws. If the laws are actually that onerous that one cannot be expected to comply with them they should be eliminated not kept around and ignored when convenient.)
This information gathering is currently happening with Geithner's "stress test."
Are we sure there's any better path than exactly what we are currently doing?
First - I'm slightly disappointed with the administration's response to the financial crisis. But that might be because I'm being impatient. I can come up with all kinds of reasons this is hard.
One that occurs. Not all of the big banks are in the shit. Wells Fargo, for example, is in decent shape. How do you manage the nationalization and re-privatization process without screwing over the shareholders of Wells, in the medium term?
But second - it's one thing to stamp your feet and say "do something!" What exactly is the appropriate pro-liberty response here? For the short, and long term?
My favorite?
A progressive tax rate on transactions. Do less than (say) $1 billion in transactions? 0%. Up to $50 billion? 1%. Marginal rate on each additional $50 billion? Add another 1%. By the time you reach $2.5 trillion in transactions, you're paying 50%. Why do this? Because the threat to individual liberty posed by the very existence of a large organization is large, and the larger the organization, the larger the threat. The idea is to mitigate somewhat the return on scale large organizations get.
I can understand the "intra-firm systemic risk" that a given firm will make the same mistakes alot. So if the firm is really big, this adds to systemic risk.
But in a bubble, it doesn't matter how many firms there are. Everyone was making the same mistakes. If you chopped up Citibank into 10 smaller banks, 9 or 10 of them would have contributed to the bubble.
Does chopping firms up really reduce systemic risk that much?
Actually, this doesn't seem to have been the case. From what I've read, the "rot" is more or less limited to the majority of the mega-banks, and a festering sub-set of the small to medium banks.
The US financial system has a helluva lot of banks. Some of the biggest of them (Wells Fargo springs to mind) don't have balance sheets that look too bad, even after they were force-fed Wachovia-like-banks. Many (most?) of the small to medium sized, local banks are also just fine, but face significant systematic risk from a collapse of the big banks.
I think we can all agree that in a more perfect union, failure should mean something. Bad bankers are bad. But pragmatically, the collapse and disappearance of these institutions would be devastating. Just today I learnt than 25 year returns on bonds currently exceeds 25 year returns on stocks. BUT - if these big banks fail, and their bond-holders get pennies on the dollar, that will completely wipe out a lot of the gain and a lot of retirement accounts, and so on.
We know about things like economies of scale and super-returns to size. So it seems to me that we want to prevent anything from getting 'too big to fail' again, meaning we want to move to incentive models that encourage diversity. Hence the progressive transactions tax.
That's very interesting. But why are the small banks safer? Is it because the big banks happened to be the only ones heavily invested in MBS's? (Though I don't know why that would be). What about the counterfactual where there are no big banks? Do the small banks still behave in uncorrelated ways, or does their behavior now become more correlated because they are now servicing the MBS's that in this world are not being serviced by the big banks?
Put differently, is correlated risk really predictable from bank size, or is it a function of the types and frequencies of assets floating around on the market?
1. It just isn't clear (to me anyway) what the successful banks have done. Recall that the problem isn't just MBSs. It's also underwriting, insurance risk, and CDOs at this point. And I suspect that in some cases the hanky-panky extended to leveraging these portfolios, which would have made the down side loses much greater.
2. Not just smaller banks. Some countries (Canada, Australia) seem to have more or less avoided the disease entirely. Their larger banks seem fine. Other countries have seen every major bank blow up (Iceland).
My GUESS (pure speculation) is that when it all washes up, we will find that banks considered as a population did behave in uncorrelated ways. But when there are so few banks to choose from (on account of the market dominance of relatively few) it only takes a couple of big players making bad bets to pull the whole thing down.
I suspect that Obama really believes that the economy will eventually recover fully on its own and is willing to sacrifice it taking an extra year or so to entrench his other policy priorities that are more important to him than economic growth.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/113980/Gallup-Daily-...
Does anyone doubt that the left and the right are two sides of the same coin?
It's been more on the level of junior-high school girls deciding which bands they like and which they don't like, as opposed to criticizing Bush's flagrant and obvious violations of the Constitution.
Fortunately, the American public seems to be much more mature than Obama's critics.
Stock market up three days in a row.
If this continues, U, Will and the other squealers will be known as shrill chicken littles.
Try a little optimism instead of always looking for something nonsensical to complain about.
Why don't you go dig up FDR's skeleton and go play with it, little boy?
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Poli...
For what its worth.
Link
This is a laugh. 'Quick, let's pretend we're unanimous on this point and hope no one notices it's false!'. Has he forgotten the anti-stimulus ad that Cato took out? Signed by I forget how many economists?
And in any case, I can find you plenty of Austrian economists who will tell you that the stimulus and the bailouts are not 'indispensable' nor even desirable. The author seems to take it for granted that (as the debate said) 'everyone is a Keynesian now', and that's clearly not the case.
If they really are going to let the insolvent institutions fail, then fair enough. Make the rule that when the capital ratio is low enough for any bank, then that bank goes into bankruptcy and be clear about what the rule is. If you are going to bail out, then be clear, and explain exactly how they will be bailed out. It is the policy uncertainty that is the bad news here.
But maybe the government doing nothing is the let them fail decision. I hope so, but my cynical side says that they are milking the crisis for more Naomi Klein politics.
I'm not being snarky here; as someone who increasingly buys into the libertarian critique of the state (though not always buying into into some of the magical thinking about the efficiacy of the "free' market), I have some sympathy for the POV that the administration should be particularly cautious about further interventions into the mess. But whether from convinction or circumstance, isn't that just what the adminstration has been doing?