ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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"use of the M word will be highly correlated with opposition to bailouts"
Perhaps, but I wonder why this would be? Personally I am inclined to think the bailouts were a good idea AND to see lax lending standards and for mortgages and mortgage securitization as the biggest causes of the problem.
Yes, history is being rewritten in front of our very eyes.
@ed: I don't think so, personally. I think lax lending standards are a huge portion of it. If it were a singular problem in the US, then I'd said you just did something wrong, but lending policies all over the world were like that. They were encouraged by the government (or its banks) to fullfill their promise on cheap housing for everybody.
I also don't think the bailouts as they stand are a good idea, because they are basically just infrastructure money that will do nothing in the short-term and will kick in when you don't need it anymore. And the worst of the bailouts was the Cash-for-Clunkers, because it was short-term and totally destroyed people's perception of a market and prices.
It is, if you will, totally against the idea of lean production and likely has created a big bull-whip effect through the production stages. It would have been better to have used limited contingents per month and thus spread the effect out over a year's time. Instead we had a huge demand in a few month and now we will have almost zero demand.