I’m probably misusing the word, but I just think it’s incredibly ironic that, thanks to the Senate Republicans who blocked the compromise worked out between the White House and the Democratic majority to extend short-term loans to the automakers, the Bush Administration has now reversed its position and is open to using TARP money to keep GM and possibly Chrysler alive. Who ever thought we would see the day that this administration would prop up the Big 3 – and who thought it would happen because they were forced into it from their right?
Day: December 12, 2008
Free Market Ideology, Epilogue
In the most recent post in the Causes series, I expressed a fair amount of agreement with Joseph Stiglitz’s criticism of an excess of faith in the free market and the lax regulation that results. With the Bernard Madoff scandal (New York Times; WSJ has more information but requires subscription), Felix Salmon is asking, where were the regulators?
(By the way, if you’re wondering how the Madoff fraud was possible, remember that a hedge fund is like a bank in the sense that you put your money in and you generally leave it there for a while, and although you may take some out now and then you may also put some more in now and then, and other people are putting it in, and so on. With a bank, not all depositors can get their money out at the same time because it is tied up in long-term loans that the bank can’t call in. With Madow’s fund, investors couldn’t get their money out because he had, effectively, burned it. They had been getting periodic paper statements showing returns, but there were no real returns, and hence no assets behind that paper.)
The Baseline Scenario 