It is misleading to imply, as Morning Edition did, that Ayn Rand’s philosophy was about free markets. The idea of promoting oneself at the expense of others, advocated by Rand, is consistent with taking advantage of whatever support one is able to get from the government in this process.
For example, the top executives of Wall Street banks are happy to take advantage of the implicit government guarantee given to too-big-to-fail banks as well as the explicit guarantee that is given through deposit insurance in addition to the support given by the Federal Reserve Board through access to its discount window and other facilities. It is politically advantageous for people who benefit from these and other types of government support to claim that they are advocates of free markets even if it is not true.
It is misleading to imply, as Morning Edition did, that Ayn Rand’s philosophy was about free markets. The idea of promoting oneself at the expense of others, advocated by Rand, is consistent with taking advantage of whatever support one is able to get from the government in this process.
For example, the top executives of Wall Street banks are happy to take advantage of the implicit government guarantee given to too-big-to-fail banks as well as the explicit guarantee that is given through deposit insurance in addition to the support given by the Federal Reserve Board through access to its discount window and other facilities. It is politically advantageous for people who benefit from these and other types of government support to claim that they are advocates of free markets even if it is not true.
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A front page Washington Post article told readers:
“Analysts, however, said the United States could risk another downgrade of its credit rating and do further damage to business and consumer confidence if the supercommittee process implodes in a chaotic display of partisan rancor — for example, if a deal is approved by the supercommittee but is killed on the House floor. And analysts are deeply concerned that lawmakers could ‘de-trigger’ the automatic cuts, undoing even the modest steps Congress has so far taken to tame the soaring debt.”
It would be interesting to know who these analysts are so that readers could know if these are the same people who could not see the $8 trillion housing bubble that collapsed and wrecked the economy. It would be also worth knowing if these analysts were among the group who claimed two years ago that large deficits would send interest rates on Treasury bonds soaring. Readers should be told if the experts whom the Post relies upon for its stories are primarily known for their misunderstanding of the economy.
The piece also includes the unsupported assertion that:
“the numbers obscure a larger ideological divide. Democrats are willing to trim spending on health and retirement programs in exchange for an overhaul of the tax code that would generate significantly more revenue, with most of the burden borne by the nation’s wealthiest households.
“Republicans want to overhaul the tax code but lower the top rate from 35 percent to 28 percent and leave preferential rates untouched for capital gains and dividends. Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, said that approach would almost certainly guarantee lower taxes for the wealthy.”
There is no evidence whatsoever in this statement or elsewhere in the article of any ideological divide. The evidence is that the Republicans are more directly responsive to the demands of the wealthy whereas Democrats feel the need to also be responsive the interests of other segments of the population. If there are ideological issues here, the piece offers no insight as to what they might be.
A front page Washington Post article told readers:
“Analysts, however, said the United States could risk another downgrade of its credit rating and do further damage to business and consumer confidence if the supercommittee process implodes in a chaotic display of partisan rancor — for example, if a deal is approved by the supercommittee but is killed on the House floor. And analysts are deeply concerned that lawmakers could ‘de-trigger’ the automatic cuts, undoing even the modest steps Congress has so far taken to tame the soaring debt.”
It would be interesting to know who these analysts are so that readers could know if these are the same people who could not see the $8 trillion housing bubble that collapsed and wrecked the economy. It would be also worth knowing if these analysts were among the group who claimed two years ago that large deficits would send interest rates on Treasury bonds soaring. Readers should be told if the experts whom the Post relies upon for its stories are primarily known for their misunderstanding of the economy.
The piece also includes the unsupported assertion that:
“the numbers obscure a larger ideological divide. Democrats are willing to trim spending on health and retirement programs in exchange for an overhaul of the tax code that would generate significantly more revenue, with most of the burden borne by the nation’s wealthiest households.
“Republicans want to overhaul the tax code but lower the top rate from 35 percent to 28 percent and leave preferential rates untouched for capital gains and dividends. Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, said that approach would almost certainly guarantee lower taxes for the wealthy.”
There is no evidence whatsoever in this statement or elsewhere in the article of any ideological divide. The evidence is that the Republicans are more directly responsive to the demands of the wealthy whereas Democrats feel the need to also be responsive the interests of other segments of the population. If there are ideological issues here, the piece offers no insight as to what they might be.
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Some folks are still missing the $8 trillion housing bubble and Robert Samuelson seems to be one of them. In reviewing the housing market it is important to notice that there is a very different story by regions. In many areas (e.g. Las Vegas and Phoenix), bubbles have fully deflated and we should look for house prices to stabilize and even rise some in the years ahead. In other areas, like Los Angeles and Boston, there is likely still some air in the bubble. In these markets, prices are likely to fall in the years ahead. This can be seen as a good thing, since it will make homes more affordable for new buyers.
It would be foolish to envision a single national housing market since different regions have very different dynamics. As a result, it would be very wrong-headed to try to design a single policy — for example promoting higher prices — for the nation as a whole.
Some folks are still missing the $8 trillion housing bubble and Robert Samuelson seems to be one of them. In reviewing the housing market it is important to notice that there is a very different story by regions. In many areas (e.g. Las Vegas and Phoenix), bubbles have fully deflated and we should look for house prices to stabilize and even rise some in the years ahead. In other areas, like Los Angeles and Boston, there is likely still some air in the bubble. In these markets, prices are likely to fall in the years ahead. This can be seen as a good thing, since it will make homes more affordable for new buyers.
It would be foolish to envision a single national housing market since different regions have very different dynamics. As a result, it would be very wrong-headed to try to design a single policy — for example promoting higher prices — for the nation as a whole.
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Two years ago the Republican party adopted a requirement that every time a party member used the word “regulation” it had to be preceded by the phrase “job-killing.” Those who failed to comply were thrown out of the party.
The Post has a nice front page piece looking at the evidence that regulations are in fact serious job killers. The piece reports what almost all economists would acknowledge: regulations both eliminate and create jobs. Their net effect tends to be small.
Tell that to your favorite job creator.
Two years ago the Republican party adopted a requirement that every time a party member used the word “regulation” it had to be preceded by the phrase “job-killing.” Those who failed to comply were thrown out of the party.
The Post has a nice front page piece looking at the evidence that regulations are in fact serious job killers. The piece reports what almost all economists would acknowledge: regulations both eliminate and create jobs. Their net effect tends to be small.
Tell that to your favorite job creator.
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The Washington Post, which once told readers that Mexico’s GDP had quadruped between 1987 and 2007 to bolster its case for NAFTA (the actual increase was 83 percent), was in the exaggerated numbers again mode yesterday in discussing the impact of a trade agreement on Japan. In reporting the projections from a model, the article told readers that as a result of the trade agreement (inaccurately described as a “free trade” agreement):
“consumer prices would drop 39 percent.”
There is no model that would show this sort of effect for consumer prices as a whole. It is possible that it meant food prices, although even this impact would be quite dramatic. Food accounts for 13.7 percent of consumer expenditures in the United States. The narrower “food at home” category accounts for 7.8 percent. Since Japan has considerably higher food prices, both these numbers are presumably higher in Japan. If a trade agreement actually dropped food prices in Japan by 40 percent, this would imply a dramatic increase in the standard of living for most people in Japan.
The Washington Post, which once told readers that Mexico’s GDP had quadruped between 1987 and 2007 to bolster its case for NAFTA (the actual increase was 83 percent), was in the exaggerated numbers again mode yesterday in discussing the impact of a trade agreement on Japan. In reporting the projections from a model, the article told readers that as a result of the trade agreement (inaccurately described as a “free trade” agreement):
“consumer prices would drop 39 percent.”
There is no model that would show this sort of effect for consumer prices as a whole. It is possible that it meant food prices, although even this impact would be quite dramatic. Food accounts for 13.7 percent of consumer expenditures in the United States. The narrower “food at home” category accounts for 7.8 percent. Since Japan has considerably higher food prices, both these numbers are presumably higher in Japan. If a trade agreement actually dropped food prices in Japan by 40 percent, this would imply a dramatic increase in the standard of living for most people in Japan.
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Adam Davidson has a piece in the NYT magazine about how the middle class will have to take a hit to deal with the country’s deficit. It’s a bit quick to reach this conclusion.
First, the piece too quickly dismisses the possibility of getting substantial additional tax revenue from the wealthy. It presents the income share for those earning more than $1 million as $700 billion, saying that if we increase the tax rate on this group by 10 percentage points (from roughly 30 percent to 40 percent), then this yields just $70 billion a year.
However, if we lower our bar slightly and look to the top 1 percent of households, with adjusted gross incomes of more than $400,000, and update the data to 2012 (from 2009), then we get adjusted gross income for this group of more than $1.4 trillion. Increasing the tax take on this group by 10 percentage points nets us $140 billion a year. If the income of the top 1 percent keeps pace with the projected growth of the economy over the decade, this scenario would get us more than $1.7 trillion over the course of the decade, before counting interest savings. Of course there would be some supply response, so we would collect less revenue than these straight line calculations imply, but it is possible to get a very long way towards whatever budget target we have by increasing taxes on the wealthy.
There are also other ways to address much of the shortfall. In the case of defense, the baseline projects that military spending will average 4 percent of GDP over the next decade. We had been spending 3 percent of GDP on defense in 2000, and the share had been projected to drop further over the course of the decade. If military spending averaged 3 percent of GDP over the next decade, that would save us $2 trillion before interest savings. There are reasons that people may not want to go that low (also reasons to go lower: CATO used to advocate a budget about half this size), and it may take time to reduce Defense Department budgets, but it should not be absurd to imagine that we could get by with the same sort of military budget (relative to our economy) that we actually had a decade ago.
Another way in which we could have substantial savings that would be relatively painless is to have the Fed simply keep the bonds that it has purchased as part of its various quantitative easing operations. It currently holds around $3 trillion in bonds. The interest on these bonds is paid to the Fed and then refunded to the Treasury. Last year it refunded close to $80 billion in interest. The projections show that the Fed will sell off these bonds over the next few years so that these interest earnings will fall sharply. However, if it continued to hold the assets, over the course of a decade it could save the government around $800 billion in interest payments. The Fed might have to take other measures to contain inflation (the immediate reason for selling the assets would ostensibly be to raise interest rates and slow the economy), but it has other tools to accomplish this goal, most obviously raising reserve requirements. (The Chinese central bank uses reserve requirements as a main tool for controlling inflation.)
Finally, the big story in any serious discussion of the long-term budget is health care. We pay twice as much per person as people do in other wealthy countries. Since more than half of the tab for our health care is paid by the government, our broken health care system becomes a budget problem. If we paid the same amount per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries, we would be looking at long-term budget surpluses rather than deficits. The reason that we pay so much more is not that we get better outcomes – we don’t generally. Rather it is that we pay too much to drug companies, hospitals, medical specialists, and others in the health care industry.
We can’t keep on this course on either the public or private side. The real question is whether we look to save money by having people get fewer services or we look to save money by paying providers less. The former could mean, for example, giving seniors a Medicare voucher that we know will not be sufficient to cover the cost of care for most people. In this case, they will just have to do without some amount of care.
The other route involves restructuring the health care system. This is incredibly difficult politically as was seen in the debate over President Obama’s health care plan. Nonetheless, in the long-run serious reform is the only option, since the alternative is that large numbers of people (including very middle class people) will not be able to get decent care.
One route to get around the political obstacles is to rely on trade. (Here is a short piece I wrote on trade in health care with Jagdeesh Baghwati.) If we make it easy for people to go abroad for health care and open our doors to qualified foreign doctors, we will eventually be able to undermine the ability of the providers’ lobbies to block reform.
Even before trade has much impact on the structure of the health care industry there are enormous opportunities for large budget savings in health care costs that focus on reducing payments to providers (e.g. lower prescription drug prices in Medicare). These payment cuts would not in any obvious way lead to reduced services.
In short, there is little reason to be talking about imposing increased burdens on the middle class any time soon. For the near term, the budget deficit is clearly not a problem. The financial markets are willing to lend the country large amounts of money at very low rates. Over a longer term, the deficit will pose more of an issue, but most of this pressure will come from health care costs. If these costs can be contained, and we get additional revenue from the top 1 percent and restrain the military budget, then the need for the middle class to bear additional burdens can be pushed out well into the future.
At some point, we likely will need more revenue from the middle class since we will probably want to increase government spending in some areas like infrastructure, education, and research and development. However, this is not a near-term prospect and quite possibly not even something that will be necessary over the course of a decade. Furthermore, if the need for additional revenue comes at a time when the unemployment rate is again down in a 4-5 percent range and real wages are rising, it will be much easier for the middle class to bear.
Adam Davidson has a piece in the NYT magazine about how the middle class will have to take a hit to deal with the country’s deficit. It’s a bit quick to reach this conclusion.
First, the piece too quickly dismisses the possibility of getting substantial additional tax revenue from the wealthy. It presents the income share for those earning more than $1 million as $700 billion, saying that if we increase the tax rate on this group by 10 percentage points (from roughly 30 percent to 40 percent), then this yields just $70 billion a year.
However, if we lower our bar slightly and look to the top 1 percent of households, with adjusted gross incomes of more than $400,000, and update the data to 2012 (from 2009), then we get adjusted gross income for this group of more than $1.4 trillion. Increasing the tax take on this group by 10 percentage points nets us $140 billion a year. If the income of the top 1 percent keeps pace with the projected growth of the economy over the decade, this scenario would get us more than $1.7 trillion over the course of the decade, before counting interest savings. Of course there would be some supply response, so we would collect less revenue than these straight line calculations imply, but it is possible to get a very long way towards whatever budget target we have by increasing taxes on the wealthy.
There are also other ways to address much of the shortfall. In the case of defense, the baseline projects that military spending will average 4 percent of GDP over the next decade. We had been spending 3 percent of GDP on defense in 2000, and the share had been projected to drop further over the course of the decade. If military spending averaged 3 percent of GDP over the next decade, that would save us $2 trillion before interest savings. There are reasons that people may not want to go that low (also reasons to go lower: CATO used to advocate a budget about half this size), and it may take time to reduce Defense Department budgets, but it should not be absurd to imagine that we could get by with the same sort of military budget (relative to our economy) that we actually had a decade ago.
Another way in which we could have substantial savings that would be relatively painless is to have the Fed simply keep the bonds that it has purchased as part of its various quantitative easing operations. It currently holds around $3 trillion in bonds. The interest on these bonds is paid to the Fed and then refunded to the Treasury. Last year it refunded close to $80 billion in interest. The projections show that the Fed will sell off these bonds over the next few years so that these interest earnings will fall sharply. However, if it continued to hold the assets, over the course of a decade it could save the government around $800 billion in interest payments. The Fed might have to take other measures to contain inflation (the immediate reason for selling the assets would ostensibly be to raise interest rates and slow the economy), but it has other tools to accomplish this goal, most obviously raising reserve requirements. (The Chinese central bank uses reserve requirements as a main tool for controlling inflation.)
Finally, the big story in any serious discussion of the long-term budget is health care. We pay twice as much per person as people do in other wealthy countries. Since more than half of the tab for our health care is paid by the government, our broken health care system becomes a budget problem. If we paid the same amount per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries, we would be looking at long-term budget surpluses rather than deficits. The reason that we pay so much more is not that we get better outcomes – we don’t generally. Rather it is that we pay too much to drug companies, hospitals, medical specialists, and others in the health care industry.
We can’t keep on this course on either the public or private side. The real question is whether we look to save money by having people get fewer services or we look to save money by paying providers less. The former could mean, for example, giving seniors a Medicare voucher that we know will not be sufficient to cover the cost of care for most people. In this case, they will just have to do without some amount of care.
The other route involves restructuring the health care system. This is incredibly difficult politically as was seen in the debate over President Obama’s health care plan. Nonetheless, in the long-run serious reform is the only option, since the alternative is that large numbers of people (including very middle class people) will not be able to get decent care.
One route to get around the political obstacles is to rely on trade. (Here is a short piece I wrote on trade in health care with Jagdeesh Baghwati.) If we make it easy for people to go abroad for health care and open our doors to qualified foreign doctors, we will eventually be able to undermine the ability of the providers’ lobbies to block reform.
Even before trade has much impact on the structure of the health care industry there are enormous opportunities for large budget savings in health care costs that focus on reducing payments to providers (e.g. lower prescription drug prices in Medicare). These payment cuts would not in any obvious way lead to reduced services.
In short, there is little reason to be talking about imposing increased burdens on the middle class any time soon. For the near term, the budget deficit is clearly not a problem. The financial markets are willing to lend the country large amounts of money at very low rates. Over a longer term, the deficit will pose more of an issue, but most of this pressure will come from health care costs. If these costs can be contained, and we get additional revenue from the top 1 percent and restrain the military budget, then the need for the middle class to bear additional burdens can be pushed out well into the future.
At some point, we likely will need more revenue from the middle class since we will probably want to increase government spending in some areas like infrastructure, education, and research and development. However, this is not a near-term prospect and quite possibly not even something that will be necessary over the course of a decade. Furthermore, if the need for additional revenue comes at a time when the unemployment rate is again down in a 4-5 percent range and real wages are rising, it will be much easier for the middle class to bear.
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An NYT article discussing the impact of the European sovereign debt crisis on the U.S. economy raised the possibility that it could lead to a fall in the stock market, which would then slow consumption. It is worth noting that consumption tends to respond with a lag to changes in the stock values, and even then the impact is relatively limited.
For example, the tech crash began in March of 2000, however consumption rose by 3.8 percent, 4.0 percent, and 3.6 percent in the following three quarters. If a euro meltdown were to take a big toll on the U.S. stock market before the end of the year (more than it already has), then its impact through this channel would not be felt much before the end of 2012.
It is also worth noting that the impact over lower stock prices on consumption is not likely to be very large in any case. The stock wealth effect on annual consumption is usually estimated at between 3-4 percent. If stock prices fell by 25 percent because of a meltdown in the euro zone, this would reduce stock wealth by around $4.5 trillion. Using the higher end 4 percent estimate, this would imply a reduction in annual consumption of $180 billion or 1.2 percentage points of GDP. This is hardly trivial, but given that the actual effects are likely to be less than this, the effect of a euro meltdown on stock prices is probably not going to be the biggest cause for concern from the standpoint of economic growth.
An NYT article discussing the impact of the European sovereign debt crisis on the U.S. economy raised the possibility that it could lead to a fall in the stock market, which would then slow consumption. It is worth noting that consumption tends to respond with a lag to changes in the stock values, and even then the impact is relatively limited.
For example, the tech crash began in March of 2000, however consumption rose by 3.8 percent, 4.0 percent, and 3.6 percent in the following three quarters. If a euro meltdown were to take a big toll on the U.S. stock market before the end of the year (more than it already has), then its impact through this channel would not be felt much before the end of 2012.
It is also worth noting that the impact over lower stock prices on consumption is not likely to be very large in any case. The stock wealth effect on annual consumption is usually estimated at between 3-4 percent. If stock prices fell by 25 percent because of a meltdown in the euro zone, this would reduce stock wealth by around $4.5 trillion. Using the higher end 4 percent estimate, this would imply a reduction in annual consumption of $180 billion or 1.2 percentage points of GDP. This is hardly trivial, but given that the actual effects are likely to be less than this, the effect of a euro meltdown on stock prices is probably not going to be the biggest cause for concern from the standpoint of economic growth.
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An NYT piece on Japan’s plans to join trade talks that include the United States and other Asian countries used the phrase “free trade” six times, including in the headline. These deals will not lead to literal free trade, since they are unlikely to do much reduce the barriers that protect highly paid professionals like doctors and lawyers. Also, they are also likely result in the increase of some protectionists barriers, most notably patent and copyright protection, which are high priorities for the United States.
Therefore it would be more accurate to simply call them “trade” agreements. This would also save space.
An NYT piece on Japan’s plans to join trade talks that include the United States and other Asian countries used the phrase “free trade” six times, including in the headline. These deals will not lead to literal free trade, since they are unlikely to do much reduce the barriers that protect highly paid professionals like doctors and lawyers. Also, they are also likely result in the increase of some protectionists barriers, most notably patent and copyright protection, which are high priorities for the United States.
Therefore it would be more accurate to simply call them “trade” agreements. This would also save space.
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Floyd Norris has an interesting piece discussing the credit default market in European debt. He notes that the volume of issuance has not increased in recent months even as spread between the interest paid on the bonds of heavily indebted countries and Germany has increased. (France is an exception, which is easily explained by people wanting to bet that its situation will deteriorate.)
Norris explains the limited issuance as likely being the result of the way in which Greece’s debt is being restructured. The banks holding Greek bonds are being coerced by European to accept 50 cents on the dollar. However, this is not considered a default event that would trigger the payment on a credit default swap. The reason is that the banks are agreeing to accept this lower payment, the Greek government has not actually defaulted on a payment owed. Since this would likely be the pattern for the resolution of other sovereign debt crises, a credit default swap will be of little value.
Floyd Norris has an interesting piece discussing the credit default market in European debt. He notes that the volume of issuance has not increased in recent months even as spread between the interest paid on the bonds of heavily indebted countries and Germany has increased. (France is an exception, which is easily explained by people wanting to bet that its situation will deteriorate.)
Norris explains the limited issuance as likely being the result of the way in which Greece’s debt is being restructured. The banks holding Greek bonds are being coerced by European to accept 50 cents on the dollar. However, this is not considered a default event that would trigger the payment on a credit default swap. The reason is that the banks are agreeing to accept this lower payment, the Greek government has not actually defaulted on a payment owed. Since this would likely be the pattern for the resolution of other sovereign debt crises, a credit default swap will be of little value.
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Barry Ritholz has a nice takedown of Mayor Bloomberg’s claim that Congress forced the banks to make lots of money by selling bad mortgages. As Barry rightly points out, this is not a story that serious people can tell. It’s like denying climate change or evolution.
However, there are two items worth correcting in Ritholz’s account. First, the core problem facing the economy today is not the legacy of the financial crisis, it is the bursting of the housing bubble. While it was a lot of fun watching the banks fall like dominos in the fall of 2008, and seeing all the honchos who told us this could never happen staying up late on weekends trying to stem the crash, this is really secondary in the story of the economy’s current problems.
Whatever the problems of the banking system, they are not holding down the economy. Creditworthy borrowers (by pre-bubble standards) can get mortgages at record low interest rates. The same is true for larger corporations who borrow directly on credit markets. Even few smaller businesses report access to credit as major problem.
Rather the economy’s problem is that there is no source of demand to replace the consumption driven by housing bubble wealth that has now disappeared or the housing construction that resulted from hugely inflated bubble prices. We would be in pretty much the same situation today even if there had been no financial crisis. This can be seen by the example of other countries, most notably Spain, who had a much better regulated financial system. Like the United States, Spain had a huge housing bubble that burst, and as a result it is still facing double digit unemployment even though it had no financial crisis.
The other item that needs correction is Ritholz’s comment that Greenspan and the rest believe that leaving the market to run itself is the best way to manage the economy. In fact, Greenspan and other alleged free marketers have no interest whatsoever in the free market. They totally support explicit insurance, in the form of deposit insurance and implicit insurance in the form of “too big to fail” guarantees. The banks have taken advantage of the latter insurance in a big way in the last three years.
What we are really fighting over is not a free market, but rather whether the banks will have to pay for the insurance that they get from the government and also face restrictions on their actions as a result of this insurance. (The company that insures my house prohibits me from setting up a fireworks factory in the basement.)
It is understandable that banks, that want to get their government insurance for free, would like to pretend that they just want a free market, but people who don’t share the banks’ agenda should be not be fooled by this claim.
Barry Ritholz has a nice takedown of Mayor Bloomberg’s claim that Congress forced the banks to make lots of money by selling bad mortgages. As Barry rightly points out, this is not a story that serious people can tell. It’s like denying climate change or evolution.
However, there are two items worth correcting in Ritholz’s account. First, the core problem facing the economy today is not the legacy of the financial crisis, it is the bursting of the housing bubble. While it was a lot of fun watching the banks fall like dominos in the fall of 2008, and seeing all the honchos who told us this could never happen staying up late on weekends trying to stem the crash, this is really secondary in the story of the economy’s current problems.
Whatever the problems of the banking system, they are not holding down the economy. Creditworthy borrowers (by pre-bubble standards) can get mortgages at record low interest rates. The same is true for larger corporations who borrow directly on credit markets. Even few smaller businesses report access to credit as major problem.
Rather the economy’s problem is that there is no source of demand to replace the consumption driven by housing bubble wealth that has now disappeared or the housing construction that resulted from hugely inflated bubble prices. We would be in pretty much the same situation today even if there had been no financial crisis. This can be seen by the example of other countries, most notably Spain, who had a much better regulated financial system. Like the United States, Spain had a huge housing bubble that burst, and as a result it is still facing double digit unemployment even though it had no financial crisis.
The other item that needs correction is Ritholz’s comment that Greenspan and the rest believe that leaving the market to run itself is the best way to manage the economy. In fact, Greenspan and other alleged free marketers have no interest whatsoever in the free market. They totally support explicit insurance, in the form of deposit insurance and implicit insurance in the form of “too big to fail” guarantees. The banks have taken advantage of the latter insurance in a big way in the last three years.
What we are really fighting over is not a free market, but rather whether the banks will have to pay for the insurance that they get from the government and also face restrictions on their actions as a result of this insurance. (The company that insures my house prohibits me from setting up a fireworks factory in the basement.)
It is understandable that banks, that want to get their government insurance for free, would like to pretend that they just want a free market, but people who don’t share the banks’ agenda should be not be fooled by this claim.
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