World-News

Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com: "Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration has proved serially incapable of building anything, even - in the long run - their own machine. And, from the Enron moment to the Bear Stearns one, whenever it looked like the Titanic might have hit an iceberg, it was a lock that those passengers assigned to the limited places in the lifeboats wouldn't be from steerage (or be weighed down with subprime mortgages)."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032708S.shtml

--------

Giving the Fed new powers ignores history

Cato Institute
by Steven Horwitz

06/13/08

Like the child who murders his parents and then asks for pity because he’s an orphan, the Federal Reserve has a long history of asking for more regulatory powers to clean up messes for which its action or inaction is the primary cause. The recently proposed changes to its mandate that would give it broader regulatory powers over institutions other than traditional banks, along with its unilateral decision to provide the equivalent of discount window services to Bear Stearns and other similar firms, simply continue that pattern. The housing market mess that doomed Bear Stearns was another in a long line of financial crises that were the fault of government followed by the regulators saying ‘if only we had these new powers, we could prevent this from happening again.’ History suggests, however, that it is the regulatory powers themselves that are the primary problem and that less regulated financial markets are in fact more stable than the overly regulated status quo...

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9462


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=American+economy
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Federal+Reserve
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Enron
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Bear+Stearns
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=mortgage
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Tom+Engelhardt