Dull But Informative

How Democracy Ruined the Bailout

Getting politics involved was Bernanke and Paulson's biggest mistake.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

Never was it a good idea to have a financial crisis in the middle of a presidential election. Involving Congress was a mistake. Letting the technical matter of keeping the banks afloat become a political football was a terrible idea. Letting our willingness to deploy giant sums of taxpayer money become the measure of credibility was a disaster. Letting all this be sold on Capitol Hill amid shrieks about the country collapsing into a Second Great Depression was a confidence killer across the economy, which until that point had held up well.

It's possible in hindsight to imagine a better course. Had matters simply been left in the hands of the Federal Reserve and fellow bank regulators, the "crisis" might have become fodder for little more than future late-night reminiscences by retired bureaucrats, pleasuring themselves with how closely the world came to burning down without the public ever knowing it.

Their efforts wouldn't have spared us a recession, perhaps a deep recession. But one mistake has been the degree to which recession-fighting has gotten mixed up with the system-bracing that should have been the preoccupation of the technocrats, with the less said to the broader public the better.
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Project Gutenberg Keeps Rolling

The full text of Maurice Liber's "Rashi" is now online.