Posts Tagged ‘nationalization’
Back when I had time to read The New Yorker, I was a big fan of James Surowiecki. I would always look for his column; if it was there, it was usually the first thing I would read. Unfortunately, he’s no fan of mine. Surowiecki makes three points about our recent long post on nationalization: [...]
Writing in the Financial Times on January 27th, 2009, Peter Boone and I expressed our opposition to bank nationalization in no uncertain terms, If you want to end up with the economy of Pakistan, the politics of Ukraine, and the inflation rate of Zimbabwe, bank nationalization is the way to go. Most others who recently advocated a managed [...]
Regular readers will know that we are fans of Thomas Hoenig, president of the Kansas City Fed (see here). I was catching up on the week’s news via Calculated Risk and came across Hoenig’s recent op-ed in the Financial Times, which I recommend as a follow-up to (or shorter version of) our previous post. Nor surprisingly, [...]
The post was co-authored by Simon Johnson and James Kwak. When the stress tests were first announced on February 10, bank stocks went into a slide (the S&P 500 Financial Sector Index fell from 133.13 on February 9 to 96.18 two weeks later), in part on fears that the stress tests would be a prelude [...]
One of the determinants of how you feel about the Geithner Plan is what you think will happen if it fails. By “fails,” I mean that the buyers’ bids are lower than the sellers’ reserve prices, so the toxic assets don’t actually get sold. Brad Delong, for example, is moderately in favor of the plan, [...]
The more aggressive the government’s responses to the economic crisis become, the more likely that they will end up in the courts. Changes in regulation can be interpreted as constraints on the ownership of property – especially by the people who own that property – and therefore such changes have occasionally ended up in the [...]
If I had infinite time, I would respond to all reader questions and suggestions. Unfortunately, I can’t. But I’m hoping to occasionally post some in-depth responses to some of the tougher questions we get. Chris Uregian, one of our readers, sent us three questions by email. In summary, he thought that we were overlooking some [...]
More extra-credit reading while on spring break: Sanjiv Gupta has an article at The Huffington Post about the relationship between the financial crisis, our banking sector, and democracy. The central question, as I see it, is an old one: how to ensure that a democratic political system is not undermined by a non-democratic economic system. [...]
This is my last post on nationalization for at least a week, and hopefully a lot longer than that. I’m tired of writing about it. But I was listening to Raghuram Rajan on Planet Money, and things became a little more clear to me. Rajan was saying that he had some concerns about nationalization and [...]
“Nationalization” has been the word of the last month, with support not only from the usual suspects, but from Lindsey Graham, Alan Greenspan, and (to some degree, although they won’t say the word) Richard Shelby and John McCain. However, different people ascribe different meanings to this word; in particular, opponents like to define nationalization as [...]
The debate on bank nationalization in the United States is off to an inauspicious start. Most of the arguing so far is framed in terms of: yes/no, or what kind of in-between strategy can be tried and for how long. This misses the point. In some important and not good ways, we have already nationalized the financial system.
At the end of last week, Senators Dodd and Schumer signalled that financial elite solidarity has broken; “nationalization” is no longer taboo. The consensus is dead (check with Barney Frank), crazy ideas abound, and long live what new policy approach? Here’s five sets of issues to guide your viewing this week as we slip and slide sideways into [...]
The worst possible way to nationalize would be to assume responsibility for the liabilities of banks, at the same time as not putting in place adequate oversight and failing to ensure that the taxpayer gets any upside. Even worse, we could install managers with a proven track record of incompetence. Anyone who proposed such a [...]
At 11am this morning, from the Cash Room at the Treasury, Secretary Geithner will lay out his vision (and hopefully some convincing details) regarding how to get the US financial system back on its feet. What should we listen for as indications that this is heading in the right direction?
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Who Nationalized Whom?
July 17, 2009 in Commentary
Tags: Dimon, nationalization, paulson
Hank Paulson’s testimony yesterday was informative, if only because it illustrated that he himself still understands little about the origins and nature of the global crisis over which he presided. Perhaps his book, out this fall, will redeem his reputation. A fundamental principle in any emerging market crisis is that not all of the oligarchs [...]