OT: Geek/Tech/Entrepreneur Stuff to do in PHX

[Craig White]

On Sun, 2009-08-02 at 21:43 -0700, Eric Cope wrote:
>         I would examine the "free market" again. We are /not/ in a
>         free market,
>         and haven't even been close to one for a while. We never
>         deregulated
>         anything, indeed, the pages of regulation haven't decreased
>         since Regan.
>         Greenspan turned out to be one of the biggest
>         interventionists, only
>         outdone by Bernanke. You can't blame the mess on bankers, if
>         they didn't
>         make those decisions someone else would have, and the outcome
>         wouldn't
>         have been any different (in other words, it is a symptom, not
>         a cause).
>         The problem stems from many central banks including our own
>         Federal
>         reserve cutting interest rates from 2001-2004 by (essentially)
>         "printing" money. Since the housing market was one of the most
>         regulated
>         (that is to say, there were government-enforced lending
>         standards and
>         intervention my Fannie and Freddie), so people spent that new
>         money on
>         houses before anything else (Oil too, because energy is
>         closely tied to
>         the market), drove prices up, created a misallocation of
>         capital
>         disproportionate with consumer demand, and we crashed when not
>         enough
>         people could humanly gather the money to buy a new house at
>         the price
>         they were at.
----
no, there was no growth in anything but property values because the
stock market was stagnant. The housing bubble was driven by escalating
prices driven by investor purchases of housing which was completely
unsustainable. The economy of 2000 > 2006 was a false bubble of real
estate growth.

To suggest that Greenspan was an interventionist means that you don't
believe in his love for Ayn Rand and all of his efforts at deregulation.
Things like deregulating the firewalls between banks and investment
houses. You can find the origins of this in the Graham-Leach act of 1999
which repealed the Glass-Steagall act. This was free market failure at
its best. Free market thinking is about corporate failure. Free market
economics is now officially dead.

Craig


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.