Cleaning Up Boomtown

Wall Street Journal ^

[dr_who]

Corporate crime calls for tough prosecution.

Saturday, June 29, 2002 12:01 a.m.

Walking through the New Orleans French Quarter the morning after Mardi Gras is never pretty: men sleeping off the night before, lots of bottles and discarded masks, and here and there the police investigating a fresh felony. This is the equivalent of what we're watching now as the U.S. economy and culture recover from the late 1990s boom.

[SteamshipTime]

Through it all, the Wall Street Journal was calling for more, more, more, and ever more of the liquidity and artificially cheap credit which enabled these shenanigans to go on for so long.

Hypocritical weenies.

[dr_who]

That's an interesting stance, but the year is 2002, not 1929. Where does the article talk about "artificially cheap credit" and "liquidity"? What WSJ articles are you talking about? Is the problem the supply of money or is it what you do (much less are permitted to do) with the money?

[VOA]

The best way to clean up boomtown is to find those guilty of actual crimes and prosecute them.

Take their money, new cars and homes; turn them out on the street to fend for themselves.

That should be humiliation enough.

Of course, given that many of them are great shysters and there are a lot of fools out there...
in five years, they'd be rich again, more than likely.

[SteamshipTime]

The WSJ has long been in the supply-side camp and is a big cheerleader for the Fed, never more so than when the Fed is cutting the discount rate and acquiring government bonds. To their credit, they published several columns by more conservative financial commentators, including Burton Malkiel, who pointed out that economic laws never change.

If money and credit are allowed to seek their free market rates, companies which are an unsustainable investment are wiped out quickly or never get off the ground.