bailout

Mortgage Bailouts and the Chicago Tea Party

Lynne Kiesling Count me in as a taxpayer, mortgage holder, and economist who thinks that the Obama mortgage bailout program is bad policy-it’s expensive with little obvious benefit, it creates bad incentives and ex post rewards bad decisions (bad decisions that were abetted by bad government policy), and it’s morally reprehensible. Peter Klein’s remarks on …

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Bailouts, Stimulus, and Debt: John Cochrane and Russ Roberts on Econtalk

Lynne Kiesling I recommend this EconTalk podcast between Russ Roberts and John Cochrane very highly: John Cochrane, of the University of Chicago, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the financial crisis. He talks about the origins of the crisis, why the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) was flawed from the beginning, why mark-to-market accounting …

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“Fixing” the Economy: How Do You “Fix” an Ecosystem?

Lynne Kiesling In the post-election show of sleeve-rolling-up meeting between Barack Obama and John McCain, their main rhetoric revolved around how they could work together to “fix up the economy”.  At the time I wrote about how that language rankled me (and Russ Roberts), because the economy is not a closed-system project, and politicians who …

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