All Posts Tagged With: "Henry Paulson"

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 exacerbated [...]

18Nov2009 | Chidem Kurdas | 0 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” (TBTF) [...]

2Mar2009 | Michael Heberling | 4 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 that [...]

2Mar2009 | Robert P. Murphy | 8 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 | 8 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 | 2 comments | Continued