Greed is Good – Weekend WSJ
Most likely I am preaching to the choir but I sure wish President Obama understood this. It is all too easy to blame “greedy Wall St.” What about the homebuyers, mortgage officers and most of all the rating agencies that really got us into this mess? And furthermore, how does any self-respecting economist expect to get us out by reducing incentives for top-notch work in the banks? Maybe it doesn’t scare you but hearing the government dictate salary caps feels like a slippery slope to me.
Tags: greed
Excellent! Austrian insights into the cause of the so-called business cycle – central banks, their interest rate manipulations & fiat currencies -reveals the players you mention above as symptomatic, not causative. Decision making in such an environment becomes a process of finding a chair each time the music stops, but the amplitude of the wave keeps increasing, whipped ever higher by the above mentioned blackgaurds, & the distance between your butt & the chair becomes so large that, even if you are one of the relatively lucky ones to land a seat, there will be a painful thud involved.
I know mixing metaphors is supposed to be a verboten, but I had a semi-sweet gewurztraminer with lasagna last night, too, & liked it very much, lol….
Looking to the Austrians is relatively easy here …. one shares this apartment.
“Self-respecting economist”? While I am sure the coutiers & courtesans have gobs of self-respect, my question would be why should anyone else respect them? The Keynesians & their variants have never been right about anything, & identifying scapegoats is part of what they get paid to do. If you want self-respecting, & respectable, economists, look to the Austrians – none of whom are at court.
As for the slipperry slope, the toboggans launched long ago; luck to us all in surviving the descent relatively intact.