found in this fark thread. Can’t believe I’ve never seen this before.
Month: February 2009
Government Intervention, Not the Lehman Collapse, Caused the Financial Crisis – WSJ.com:
To prevent misguided actions in the future, it is urgent that we return to sound principles of monetary policy, basing government interventions on clearly stated diagnoses and predictable frameworks for government actions.
Massive responses with little explanation will probably make things worse. That is the lesson from this crisis so far.
“Should the federal government be doing any of this?”:
The answer is no, of course, as Crisis and Leviathan author Robert Higgs explains in a superb article about the so-called stimulus for the Christian Science Monitor:
Our greatest need at present is for the government to go in the opposite direction, to do much less, rather than much more. As recently as the major recession of 1920-21, the government took a hands-off position, and the downturn, though sharp, quickly reversed itself into full recovery. In contrast, Hoover responded to the downturn of 1929 by raising tariffs, propping up wage rates, bailing out farmers, banks, and other businesses, and financing state relief efforts. Roosevelt moved even more vigorously in the same activist direction, and the outcome was a protracted period of depression (and wartime privation) from which complete recovery did not come until 1946.
Read the rest here.
The Frank-Obama Rescue Plan: Easier Money To the Rescue! (Reason-Hit & Run):
Once again, let’s review: We got into this mess because of what Obama castigated as “an era of easy money, in which we were allowed and even encouraged to spend without limits; to borrow instead of save.” And we’ll get out it precisely by…spending and borrowing more, especially on overvalued property.