Bailout and Markets

So much for all those predictions that the markets would begin to recover once members of the U. S. House of Representatives summoned the courage to resist the populist outcry and vote for Hank Paulson's $700-billion rescue plan...the market appears to have arrived at a more considered view of the U. S. Treasury Secretary's scheme. Sadly, the market's negative verdict is on the mark...

While there isn't perfect unanimity on this, it is widely acknowledged that a significant part, if not the root, of our difficulties originated with the low-interest-rate policy implemented by the Alan Greenspan-led Fed in 2001-2005.

This generated a housing boom, which was further stoked by the financial engineering of Wall Street in securitizing mortgages, by obliging bond rating agencies in evaluating these securities and by portfolio managers eagerly willing to buy them, hungry for extra returns in a low interest rate environment...

Austrian economists hold that downturns are the inevitable aftermath of loose monetary policy, thus opposing explanations typically heard prior to the current crisis that attributed recessions to price shocks, underconsumption or central bank tightening of monetary policy...

Most commentators resist following the Austrian logic through to the end out of the fear of repeating the policy mistakes that led to the Great Depression. This reflects the orthodox interpretation of that period, according to which the economy fell apart in the early 1930s while U. S. president Herbert Hoover took a laissez-faire approach to the downturn and the Fed ran an overly tight monetary policy.

The truth is that the Fed at the time did try to add liquidity, lowering its rediscount rate until late 1931 and continuously increasing reserves under its control. Money supply nevertheless fell, but that was because people lost faith in the financial system and hoarded currency. Meanwhile, Hoover met the downturn with interventionist gusto. He passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff to help domestic industries and obtained the co-operation of business leaders to support wages and investment. We haven't gone down this protectionist and corporatist road yet but Hoover's attacks on short selling and his creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which among other things loaned money to banks, bear an eerie resemblance to the current policy response.

"We might have done nothing", Hoover said, "[but] we determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists." Thus has the Bush administration decided as well, having successfully cajoled a recalcitrant Congress to follow Hoover's example.

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My thoughts: We are repeating the mistakes of the past. Bush is following the Hoover playbook of intervention to re-inflate a bubble. Commentators either through ignorance or ideology are blaming free markets. We are going to elect a president who will openly embrace more intervention, regulation, and socialism. The question now becomes will this be worse than the Great Depression?