Sunday, September 6, 2009

Capitalism on the rocks

People say that the recent financial crisis is a failure of the capitalism or even a failure of the free market. I don't agree. The real-estate bubble and the misunderstanding of the risk of derivatives, now those were market failures. The crash was a correction. People were selling snake oil. Those people went belly up. Seems to me, the market found the right answer, eventually.

Too bad, the government stepped in and bailed out the snake oil salesmen. Now they're back. Maybe they'll straighten up and fly right for a while. Maybe they'll just switch to selling another kind of snake oil. And we, the public, are a couple trillion deeper in hock.

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