Feb. 19th, 2009

ymarkov: (Default)

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.
Read more... )

Profile

ymarkov: (Default)
Yisroel Markov

August 2025

S M T W T F S
     12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
2425262728 2930
31      

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Sep. 22nd, 2025 08:00 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios