To: RightOnTheLeftCoast
The root cause of this mess is Federal intervention in the mortgage markets. ********************
Exactly right. Although I fear that further government intervention will lead us in the wrong direction, I also fear that no intervention at all would be a disaster. Few who lived through the great depression are around today to warn us of how really dreadful it was. Ironically, it is the opinion of some that it was socialism (in the form of public works projects, for one) that turned the economy around. There are others who believe it was World War II. Perhaps it was a combination of the two, but I am no history student.
319 posted on
09/28/2008 12:33:56 PM PDT by
trisham
(Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis.)
To: trisham
"Exactly right. Although I fear that further government intervention will lead us in the wrong direction, I also fear that no intervention at all would be a disaster."
Thanks, Trisham.
An analogy: Imagine the situation if Congress had, instead of meddling with mortgages, decided to meddle in brick-making. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and Jamie Gorelick felt it would be great for the Federal Government to force brick-makers to make bricks out of cardboard. That way Those Less Fortunate could have bricks too! And now those crappy risky bricks are built into the whole global finance system. A $62 trillion pyramid has a bunch of those bricks built into it and is teetering. It's gonna fall on all of us. What to do? We can complain about how the bricks got made all day. We can wait for the free market to come out with replacement bricks. But there are so many bricks that only government has the resources and the speed to patch all the bricks quickly so they can be extracted one by one by the market.
I wish it were otherwise but see no alternative that doesn't risk an absolute calamity.
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