Monday, November 7, 2011

Barry Ritholtz Can't Take It That Fellow Liberal Bloomberg Blames Congress For '08 Meltdown

In The Washington Post, here.

In the end, I think this is because of two things. One, a bias toward liberalism, the finger prints of which are all over the current crisis, so Barry can't stand it when one of his own departs from his version of the accepted narrative and puts the blame on liberalism's institutional face. And two, a widespread intellectual failure affecting liberals, conservatives and independents alike, which conflates the free market and the banking sector:

The previous Big Lie — the discredited belief that free markets require no adult supervision — is the reason people have created a new false narrative.

The banks are beholden to a fiat currency mediated by a fiat central bank fed by a government printing press. They are by no means a private sector player, and haven't been since 1913. Banking isn't a free market, it does require adult supervision, and the taxpayers should be outraged by the on-going failure of it every goddamn Friday night. Congress willingly acceded to this failure in the 1990's under Clinton and the Republicans when they gave banks free reign over money creation. The Federal Reserve became beside the point. It only took a decade to implode.

To paraphrase Russell Kirk: Free markets aren't a failure, they just haven't been tried recently.
Off the Hook

Remove the taxpayer guarantee and put bankers personally on the hook, and that will change things for the better in a hurry.