I'm not sure who said it recently - I think it was Robert Kuttner - but the financiers love a free market until they get in trouble. Then, they want the government to step in.
That's what happened over the weekend when the Treasury orchestrated the establishment of the Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit (you have to love that name), which is a consortium of huge banks led by Citicorp, Chase and Bank of America, that has established a fund of $80 - $100 billion to be used to tamp down the problems in the market for exotic credit instruments, instruments which most of us can't make sense of but which have brought the financiers a lot of bucks in the past couple of years. Supposedly, there is none of our money on the line here, at least as of today.
I think the fund is a good idea, but it does highlight the severity of the problems we are facing.
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