All Posts Tagged With: "Henry Paulson"

Boom and Bust: Crisis and Response

America has experienced a classic economic boom and bust, which I first chronicled in the November 2007 Freeman. Ill-conceived policies to encourage homeownership channeled cheap credit into housing markets. Land-use and zoning policies restricted the supply of housing in key desirable markets. In The Housing Boom and Bust, Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution has [...]

24Feb2010 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. | 2 comments | Continued

Financial Crises and the Federal Reserve’s Punch Bowl

Why did the U.S. financial system nearly collapse last year? People blame Wall Street’s excessive greed and risk-taking. But without easy money, the massive risk-taking could not have happened. To be sure, financial firms leveraged up—that is, they did a lot of business with borrowed money. That juiced up revenues and bonuses in the boom—and [...]

18Nov2009 | Chidem Kurdas | 12 comments | Continued

Too Big to Fail

“Once you lose your freedom to fail, you also lose your freedom to succeed and you cease to be a free society.” —U.S. Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas In March 2008 the investment banking firm Bear Sterns failed and the federal government quickly stepped in. The public was inundated with the phrase “too big to fail” [...]

2Mar2009 | Michael Heberling | 8 comments | Continued

Did Deregulated Derivatives Cause the Financial Crisis?

For a few months in 2008 I naively thought that the disastrous financial “rescue” actions led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson would at least be counterbalanced by widespread recognition that our economic turmoil had been government’s handiwork. How wrong I was. By the time of this writing, the mainstream press had delivered the “consensus” judgment [...]

2Mar2009 | Robert P. Murphy | 21 comments | Continued

The Financial Bailouts: “See the Needle and the Damage Done”

On Wednesday, September 17, 2008, according to the New York Times, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke used “a speaker phone from his ornate office” to tell Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson “that it was time to adopt a comprehensive strategy that Congress would have to approve” for dealing with the financial-market troubles. After a second call on [...]

27Feb2009 | Lawrence H. White | 13 comments | Continued

Nationalization of the Mortgage Market

Breaking down the mortgage market breakdown and how it’s all the government’s fault.

1Dec2008 | Robert P. Murphy | 7 comments | Continued

The Sky's the Limit

From the New York Times: The federal government unveiled $800 billion in new loans and debt purchases on Tuesday, hoping another infusion of cash can help unfreeze troubled credit markets and make borrowing easier for homebuyers, small businesses and students.The Federal Reserve said that it would buy up to $600 billion in mortgage-backed assets from [...]

25Nov2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

What Consumer Credit Crunch?

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson now says the government must directly stimulate the consumer-credit market with the $700 billion that Congress gave him. He says that market is at a stand-still. Really?Here’s what Time magazine reported Sunday: [I]ndustry watchers say credit card and auto lending has actually held up quite well despite the credit crunch. According [...]

16Nov2008 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

Regime Uncertainty

Nothing can stifle economic activity like uncertainty about what the government will do next. Robert Higgs has written a good deal about how “regime uncertainty” kept the U.S. economy from getting out of the Great Depression. In fact, it’s what made the depression “great.”No one knew what FDR would come up with day to day.We’re [...]

12Nov2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

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