All Posts Tagged With: "housing bubble"
U.S. Housing/Finance Policy
From the ridiculous to the subprime.
4May2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
The stocks of banks, investment banks, and associated financial institutions declined severely in 2007-08 when their many bad loans, first in subprime mortgages and then in other securities, surfaced. Scholars will be pondering this event for years to come, as they have with the Great Depression. In this instant and brief history, Charles Morris, lawyer, [...]
24Apr2009 | Michael S. Rozeff | 1 comment | ContinuedA Crisis of Political Economy
The current state and the current banking sector require each other. They are so reciprocally intertwined that each is an extension of the other.
Remember this the next time somebody tells you, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert did, that “free market madmen” caused the current financial crisis that is threatening to undermine the global economy. There is no free market. There is no “laissez-faire capitalism.” The government has been deeply involved in setting the parameters for market relations for eons; in fact, genuine “laissez-faire capitalism” has never existed. Yes, trade may have been less regulated in the nineteenth century, but not even the so-called Gilded Age featured “unfettered” markets.
24Apr2009 | Chris Matthew Sciabarra | 6 comments | ContinuedClueless Obama
If President Obama doesn’t understand why the economy tanked, he surely won’t know what recovery requires. And if he doesn’t know that, he’s surely part of the problem, not the solution. In his speech on the economy at Georgetown University this week, Obama again showed that he hasn’t a clue what caused the economic calamity. [...]
17Apr2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Should Be Done?
From FEE on Vimeo. Western New England College, March 2009
14Apr2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedBarney Frank Gets a Little Heat
Rep. Barney Frank, one of the most vigorous advocates of using Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to encourage subprime mortgage lending, got a little hot under the collar yesterday when a Harvard student asked if he was willing to accept any responsibility for the financial crisis, which has its roots in a housing policy based [...]
8Apr2009 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedThat's Politics for You
I found this interesting tidbit in Wikipedia’s entry on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act: Democrats agreed to support the bill after Republicans agreed to strengthen provisions of the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act… G-L-B, the last significant bank deregulation that occurred in the U.S., repealed the part of the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall Act that forbade a single institution [...]
12Mar2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Fed Should Inflate to End the Financial Crisis?
The current housing and financial crisis has many people blaming “greed and market forces” for unleashing a panoply of evils on the unsuspecting middle class. This has led to many bad proposals to solve the crisis, such as the April 14 Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Inflation Solution to the Housing Mess” by John Makin, [...]
1Jul2008 | Ivan Pongracic Jr. | 1 comment | ContinuedConstruction Boom and Bust Between the World Wars
Imagine a story about collapse of the real-estate markets that states: “Most of the millions piled up in paper profits had melted away, many of the millions sunk in developments had been sunk for good and all, the vast inverted pyramid of credit had toppled to earth, and the lesson of the economic falsity of [...]
1Jun2008 | Robert Higgs | 2 comments | ContinuedGovernment Schools and the Housing Mess
The Law of Unintended Consequences is a fascinating thing. You can never be entirely sure what the second-, third-, etc.- order effects of any action will be. This is especially so with government policy because centralized decision-making can do so much damage to so many people. That ought to humble the politicians and bureaucrats, but [...]
1Jun2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedCan the Feds Save the Housing Market?
Government Solutions Will Only Make Matters Worse
1Jun2008 | Robert P. Murphy | 13 comments | ContinuedThe Fed Didn’t Bail Out Wall Street?
In his New York Times column (“It’s Monetary Policy, Not a Morality Play,” September 9, 2007), Tyler Cowen decried the clichéd pattern of casting all financial stories into “simple moral narratives.” Although many commentators have questioned the Fed’s handling of the credit crunch last August and September, Cowen sees no hanky-panky: Talk of a bailout [...]
1Jan2008 | Robert P. Murphy | 4 comments | ContinuedMonetary-Policy Disasters of the Twentieth Century
Kirby R. Cundiff is an associate professor of finance at Northeastern State University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an adjunct associate professor of finance at the University of Maryland University College. The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913 and soon did what central banks almost always do: it started printing lots of money. During World [...]
1Jan2007 | Kirby R. Cundiff | 5 comments | ContinuedThe Neglected Factor in the Housing “Bubble”
Is there a housing “bubble”? Debate has swirled recently around this question. But one factor behind increased prices in the housing market seems to be frequently left out of the debate or only mentioned in passing—government. Then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan proclaimed last May 20 that the nation’s housing market was “frothy.” He also said [...]
1Mar2006 | Raymond J. Keating | 2 comments | Continued-
The Latest
Government Beneficence and Other Fairy Tales
I admit I’m amused by the unceasing economic and political malarkey that flows from the pundits at... Read More
The Myths of the Interventionists
One of the most pernicious myths in the economic history of the twentieth century is the belief that... Read More
JPMorgan Chase and Casino Banking
JPMorgan Chase & Co., one of the nation’s leading banks, revealed in May that a London trader racked... Read More
Individualism, Trade-Unions, and “Self-Governing Combinations”
Who do you imagine said this? “[Trade-unions] seem natural to the passing phase of social evolution,... Read More
Bubbles, Malinvestment, and Higher Education
Many commentators are asking whether the next big bubble to burst will be the debt associated with the... Read More
