We Got Fooled Again!

Balbus,

As far as Alan Greenspan. I'am seeing that several free market advocates don't view his policy of keeping interest rates artifically low as an example of free market policy. This they say contributed to the housing bubble.

Don’t Blame Free Markets for the Crisis: They Never Existed -- Seeking Alpha

Greenspan Was NOT a Free Market Economist



As far as Bill Clinton's free market input. Isn't his administration's pressing of Fannie Mae to lower it's credit standards for low and middle income families an example of government intervention playing a part in this?

Clinton rejects blame for financial crisis | 4politics.org

 

YoMama

You clearly didn’t read - Free market = plutocratic tyranny.
http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/s...?t=353336&f=36

“Because all free market systems favour wealth, the freer a ‘market system’ becomes the more wealth takes over power until a tipping point is reached and that’s when wealth re-orders things to its own interests and if left unchecked forms a tyranny of the wealthy.”

*

And this is a warning from history –

"By the end of the 19th century, some unforeseen but serious consequences of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America had produced a deepening disenchantment with the principal economic basis of classical liberalism—the ideal of a market economy. The main problem was that the profit system had concentrated vast wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of industrialists and financiers, with several adverse consequences. First, great masses of people failed to benefit from the wealth flowing from factories and lived in poverty in vast slums. Second, because the greatly expanded system of production created many goods and services that people often could not afford to buy, markets became glutted and the system periodically came to a near halt in periods of stagnation that came to be called depression. Finally, those who owned or managed the means of production had acquired enormous economic power that they used to influence and control government, to manipulate an inchoate electorate, to limit competition, and to obstruct substantive social reform."
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/339173/liberalism/237347/Modern-liberalism

*

 

Motion

Links to a couple of blogs by the same person, an Adam Sharp, someone who, by there own admission, has only worked briefly as a ‘Financial Advisor’.

Gewiz Motion you really are bringing out the big guns.

So what are you saying that you think Alan Greenspan was a life long supporter of Keynesian economic ideas or a communist?

NO - you know as well as I that Greenspan the libertarian was an advocate of the deregulated neoliberal/free market system.

*

Here is none other than Milton Friedman (not some one time ‘Financial Advisor’ but I believe a rather famous economist and advocate of neoliberal/free market ideas) -

What’s that Milton – “I have generally found ourselves in accord on monetary theory and policy”

*

Come on man, we’ve been through all your crap about Fannie Mae before – you couldn’t defend it then and I don’t think you can defend it now.

Fannie Mae In 2004
http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=328058&page=2

Oh it’s the free marketeer’s wet dream to blame the Fannie’s for everything that happened but it just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

*

 

Balbus,

Well those are Bill Clinton's words. Why do you think Clinton would say this?

I never said that Fannie Mae was the sole cause of the financial collapse but that they seem to have a significant role in this.

 

Don't blame Fannie and Freddie
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf.../usa.mortgages

“The GOP Blames the Victim”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1222...googlenews_wsj

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were victims, not culprits http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives/2008/09/fannie_mae_and.html

*

I hadn’t realised just how privatised the Fannie was, it needed better regulation and monitoring it seems to have become subverted into free market thinking and the maximisation of profit, a symptom of the whole malaise I’ve been trying to highlight.
It seems to me it would have been better if the Fannie had never been privatised and had kept much more of its public service ethos.


*

 

Over here a lot more people were sceptical over how much change Obama could bring, or even wanted to bring.

But then in Europe politics seems to be a lot more about politics than personality.

Obama is seen as heading a political party that is a coalition of what is termed the ‘the left’ in US politics but is mainly dominated by the right of centre in reality.

A right that has a vested interest in the status quo.

To me the great problem in the US is a political system which gives too much influence to wealth tried to an unstable and unsustainable economic system, that is only in place because of a political system which gives too much influence to wealth.

(We have a similar problem in the UK)

The way many sections of the wealth favouring right are claiming that the ‘government’ is to blame for the ongoing financial crisis and with burdening tax payers with the bill rather than the real culprit – the unstable, unsustainable and deeply flawed neo-liberal economic thinking that wealth favours, is a case in point.