Warning: “Do nothing” wankfest ahead.
Via the Telegraph:
We need more risk and less regulation of the financial sector
Um, OK?
Capitalism is based on innovation.
Adam Smith rang. He said “did you even READ my fucking book?”
But innovations are not always well understood when they first turn up. People buy too many of them and pay too much for them.
I just want to quote this as evidence the market does not always work perfectly and people are not rational consumers. This will become important in a minute.
That is what happened in this crisis. People paid too much for financial products that they didn’t understand.
And sold them for too much. And floated an entire economy on the basis they would keep selling forever and would never drop in price. Oh, and there was something about lying to investors and firing people who disagreed with that assessment, using things like evidence and projected trends. So not so much a naive mistake and more like carefully calculated get rich schemes.
Left to function alone, the market would have punished those that had invested in the companies that lost.
And everyone else, for good measure. The market approves of collateral damage.
Companies going bust and investors losing their money are not a “failure of capitalism”.
Not even if they are making a yearly profit, yet go out of business due to a lack of credit during more quiet seasons? Because that’s what is happening.
It is capitalism; and if you don’t like it, then you don’t like the system.
If you love Communism so much, why don’t you live there?
There was no need for the British government to bail out the banks last autumn.
Apart from that whole “turning into the next Somalia” thing, and everyone knows Somalia is a healthy and functioning market economy, with reported growth in such vital areas as piracy, terrorism, warlordism and mercenary work.
The wrong policy response – the one adopted – was to reward investor error.
Yeah, those silly investors, believing banking CEOs. They should have beat them until they told them the truth about the risks they were taking! Jack Bauer would do no less.
It saved the capitalists made rich at the expense of private capitalism.
If you hate that so much, why don’t you move to Cuba or something, Che?
Calls for heavy-handed regulation to restrict the actions of banks are the flip-side of acting so as to undermine the market’s means to punish poor decision-making.
Yeah, not allowing financially risky decisions with the threat of jail is totally not a punishment when compared to what The Market will do.
This means there will be less risk-taking in the economy as a whole – less innovation and experimentation, less diversity and dynamism.
I cite the Open Source Movement as proof people cannot innovate without a profit motive.
We will have an economy that grows more slowly and a society that is less tolerant, offering fewer opportunities for those who have no money but good ideas to get ahead.
Whereas a worldwide economic depression every couple of years won’t make people more intolerant or offer fewer opportunities at all.
The financial sector is unlikely to be able to return to sustained profitability without significant restructuring of a much more radical nature than the current favourites of creating “boring banks” and “bad banks”. Governments are now the major shareholders in these institutions, and they should insist upon their restructuring.
Typical commie, looking to the government to solve all your problems.
Imagine if, instead of all that, we had used £100 billion or £200 billion for tax cuts to stimulate the real economy.
Yeah, but imagine if we had used £300 billion to stimulate the Really Real Economy (for Realness). Or £400 billion to titillate the Somewhat Less Empheral Economy. Or, and I will admit we are pushing the boat out here, £500 billion for The One True Objective Economy That No Rational Person Can Deny? What then, eh? That’s the problem with you Commies, your lack of innovative thinking.
Ye gods, that was the biggest pile of fail I have ever read.