Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones Times Online
Peggy Noonan Tells the Truth About Sarah Palin Brad DeLong
We’ll Rescue You on Four Conditions Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times. A workman-like piece on the executive comp restrictions in the bank bailout plan.
Retailers fear worst Christmas for a generation Independent
Where is my swap line? And will the diffusion of financial power Balkanize the global response to a broadening crisis? Brad Setser. A must read post on the implications of emerging economies not being included in the Fed’s dollar swap lines.
More Bailout Obscenity EconoSpeak. Be prepared to become even more annoyed.
Bernanke Is Fighting the Last War The Wall Street Journal. Anna Schwartz. co-author with Milton Friedman of “A Monetary History of the United States”, argues that the remedy that she and Friedman argued for in the Great Depression (more liquidity) is the wrong medicine now.
Antidote du jour:







Re: Tne ‘Bernanke Is Fighting The Last War’ piece in the WSJ:
A few things really ticked me off about this piece. There is that certain….well….smugness…..that ‘ole Milton (and Anna, and to a lesser extent Bernanke himself) always displayed. The “if-only” viewpoint. If only the Fed had done this or not done that, the Great Depression would never have happened. It’s all a load of bollocks. The bursting of asset price bubbles (particularly when fueled by stratospheric debt loads) bring about nasty situations that, quite frankly, are not easily solved. Of course, no one wants to admit that there may not be ANY effective solutions.
The other point that rubbed me the wrong way was her comment about how the appropriate course is to “save the banking system but don’t save the banks”. How, pray tell, does one do that? Look, if you’re going to advocate that the government save the system (which it must, obviously) then you have already abandoned the purity of your free market principles, get over it, and don’t try to revive them halfway through the thought.
Finally, how anyone can dismiss the “too big to fail” argument as completely invalid, after what just happened with Lehman, is beyond me. This is just her free market demon rearing its head again. If an entity is too big to fail, and one opposes government intervention in all cases, then that entity is too big to exist in the first place. Yet if the free market allows such an entity to form, then a contradiction in the chain of thought is exposed. Rather than dismissing the existence of systemic risk, perhaps Ms. Schwartz ought to take a closer look at her principles.