The Financial Crisis Inquiry

Economics Economics Questions
1

Phil Angelides talking about the “financial crisis”

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/03/09/midday2/

The reports of the FCIC with conclusions and dissents

He opens up with an appeal to emotion for about 3 minutes talking about the sad stories associated with the recession/depression.

keywords: “cataclysm” “impeding collapse”

Some of the questions I would have asked this guy:

  1. If the financial system is so bad as is, why do we want to prop it up and bail it out, why not let it fail?

  2. How is this a market failure when the financial sector was already very regulated and contaminated by special interests receiving government favors?

  3. How would the failure of firms with revenues of less than 100 billion dollars decimate the economy? If it really would have decimated the economy as a whole isn’t this really an indication of the failure of central banking? Wouldn’t a free market protect against such systemic failure?

  4. Do we need the "public bulwarks’ he constantly refers to?

  5. He talks about how wall street "squandered huge amounts (trillions ostensibly) of capital. Isn’t this a fallacy since what they were dealing with wasn’t really “capital” as such, but virtual money? Am I wrong to point this out? Did Wall Street really squander real capital?

  6. He constantly refers to revisionism that wants us to “forget” the real causes of the meltdown. Isn’t he really one of those revisionists since he fails to point the real ultimate cause of the systemic problems of the financial system, that is the central bank-The Federal Reserve? Who are the revisionists he thinks he is talking about? It seems to me that everyone is basically doing the same thing he is, is he trying to insinuate that it is really the Austrian school or free market advocates that are the revisionists? This is really quite incredible given that he is the one really obfuscating the issue.

I want to really pick this guy’s presentation apart and would like to have a good discussion about it. Thank you,

Phaedros

2

I’m personally tired of reading these retarded analyses that blame ‘greed’ and ‘private banks’ and ‘Wall Street.’ The Fed and the feds have so much influence in the academe and media that it’s almost pointless. We could only keep up sites like mises.org so that someone who’s dissatisfied with the establishment’s explanation could find better answers. But it’s not for everybody, not yet anyway.