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Posted by: jimdoze 5 months, 2 weeks ago

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jimdoze5 months, 2 weeks ago

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"In the 1990s and 2000s, in fact, this myth of the rational market was embraced with a fervor that even Irving Fisher never mustered. Financial markets knew best, the thinking went. They spread risk. They gathered and dispersed information. They regulated global economic affairs with a swiftness and decisiveness that governments couldn't match. And then, as debt markets began to freeze up in 2007, suddenly markets didn't do any of these things."

Markets are still far better at these things than a single individual or even a sizable group of them, such as an elected congress or a Congress of People's Deputies.

I would posit that government tinkering with markets over the long term is more a cause of our current problems than some form of "inherent flaw" in markets in general.

http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/06/17/thanks-f...

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  hyperbola5 months, 2 weeks ago
  
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  Actually we should never let the "free marketeers" forget that already Adam Smith stated that free markets don't exist and uncontrolled markets are ALWAYS used by monopolists and crooks to defraud other people.
  
  As for your "posit", after repeated failures (about every five years) ever since Reagan started the pilfering by the super-rich (1987 market crash, junk bonds, S scam, .......), your statement is more "faith-based" than based on rationality or experience.
  
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    jimdoze5 months, 1 week ago
    
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    I see, Hyperbola. Would you be the ONE who knows better than markets? Or would it, in your preferred world, be some form of "Congress of People's Deputies"?
    
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      hyperbola5 months, 1 week ago
      
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      Well jimd, you might like to think about the fact that the IMF warned the Bush administration already in 2004 that its economic and financial practices together with the failure to regulate markets was a sure guarantee of a crash. In fact, the IMF began to prepare for inspections of the US government and markets of exactly the same kind that they undertake in third-world countries.
      
      Oddly enough, the Bush administration agreed - BUT, only to be carried out AFTER they left office.
      
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