Comments on: You Got Government in My Markets! You Got Markets in My Government!

By: Lance

Lance — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 05:38:12 +0000

I think there's a difference between the market and merchant/producer capitalism. The former may exist in a primitive society, but the latter owes itself to institutions and so forth as outlined by Douglass North. But markets have always existed where exchange was necessary.

By: Lance

Lance — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:38:12 +0000

By: GilM

GilM — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 22:00:58 +0000

I'll take that as a “No.”

I'm very unhappy we are bailing them out, and with the existing quality of regulation. But, probably for different reasons than you are.

By: Renato Drumond

Renato Drumond — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 21:33:06 +0000

“We didn't properly regulate them and now we've taken on huge debt and massive exposure to their bad paper . Yeah that's a clear argument to regulate them”

No, it's not clear. A lot of economists suggest that FED shouldn't have done this in the first place. It's a bad signal and encourage this companies to make more risky investiments, because they know that they are 'too big to fail'. Maybe it's locally optimal, but creates bad incentives for the future.

By: muirgeo

muirgeo — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 20:57:41 +0000

Is that a serious question? We didn't properly regulate them and now we've taken on huge debt and massive exposure to their bad paper . Yeah that's a clear argument to regulate them in the first place and practice prudent financial planning for the people of America rather then giving into every whim of the Wall Street Cowboys.

The question should be are YOU happy we are bailing them out to prevent financial collapse because we chose to deregulate these baboons and let them run wild over our economy?

By: travis

travis — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 19:05:11 +0000

The MBS debacle is probably over 98% related to the market. No one was forcing those financial institutions to make all of those subprime mortgages and packaging them into securities to be sold to investors. No one was forcing investors to buy them. Everything was predicated on the widespread belief that housing prices wouldn't fall more than 5%. Well, when you get a highly leveraged boom and prices fall more than 5%, the financial institutions freeze up. This is purely free-market phenomenon and blaming it on low interest rates from the Fed is not being serious.

By: Pithlord

Pithlord — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:46:53 +0000

The logic of Will's neo-institutionalist point is that there is no such thing as “more regulation,” so no one can coherently be for or against it.

By: GilM

GilM — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 05:03:57 +0000

So, does any of this regulatory capture make you hesitate at all in proposing even more regulation?

By: muirgeo

muirgeo — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 03:58:26 +0000

The markets are what they are because Wall Street Cowboys and their financial institutions got every single thing they wished for. From the revoking of the Glass -Steagall Act (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act), to the ability to make complex completely opaque financial instruments via Commodity Futures Modernization Act ( turning markets into nothing more then a complex pyramid scheme) to people in high places like the fed , the treasury and the Credit rating agencies all doing their bidding for cheap credit, massive cash infusions and stonewalling of any oversight or transparency of what they were doing in the shadows.

They got to keep all the profits (at only 15% tax rate) and were big time capitalist when they were making billions stealing from the productive economy and when their house of cards came tumbling down they got all their debts to be socialized ( apparently $5 trillion dollars worth).

No they got markets in my government... corporatist in my government. They've broken it, robbed us blind and proved to some that indeed government doesn't work.

By: Antoine

Antoine — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:22:27 +0000

The new bail out plan is severe interference in american culture and will not work

http://www.berninger.de/blog-posts/blog-single-...