The U.S. government is becoming Daddy Warbucks to an increasing number of firms. According to the Wall Street Journal: ... the government has become the nation’s biggest mortgage lender, guaranteed nearly $3 trillion in money-market mutual-fund assets, commandeered and restructured two car companies, taken equity stakes in nearly 600 banks, lent more than $300...
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George W. Bush is launching a free-market think tank. The Washington Times reports: With the Obama administration establishing far-reaching controls in the auto, real estate and financial sectors, Mr. Bush said that “the role of government is not to create wealth, but to create the conditions that allow entrepreneurs and innovators to thrive.” So...
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If you got to the Blog page by passing through the Independent Institute’s home page, I hope you noticed the announcement of the publication of Housing America: Building Out of a Crisis, which I co-edited with Benjamin Powell. Ben and I have been working on this project for years, so it is nice to...
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Bruce Bartlett just informed me of the sad news that my friend, and Independent Institute Research Fellow, Professor William Marina, died this morning of a heart attack. Bill was a fearless friend of the truth and his passing will be a great loss for us all. I was first introduced to Bill about twenty...
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When my younger stepson Drake was in high school during the Clinton era, he took a class in graphic art at the California College of the Arts one summer, and one of his assignments was to create a propaganda poster. Drake took the photo of Elian Gonzalez being taken at gunpoint from his Miami...
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My old friends Jeffrey Rogers Hummel and David R. Henderson continue to argue that the Fed had little or nothing to do with fueling the housing bubble during the first five or six years of the present decade. Their latest article along these lines appears in Forbes. This is the third rendition of their...
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For nearly a decade, Americans acted as though taking on more debt posed no problem. After all, they owned real estate, and all the experts told them that real-estate prices always go up. The mightiest magnates of finance acted as if they believed this stupid story—I say stupid because the merest child might easily...
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In an insightful interview, Fannie Mae’s first Chief Credit Officer, Edward Pinto, corroborates our Research Fellow Stan Liebowitz‘s Independent Policy Report, Anatomy of a Train Wreck: Causes of the Mortgage Meltdown. Interviewed by Chip Hanlon, President of Delta Global Advisors, Pinto discusses how the affordable housing/lending lobby chipped away at lending standards until there...
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After many months of the “mainstream” media refusing to discuss the real causes of the sub-prime financial crisis, the deafening silence has finally been broken in a January 5th front-page article in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that begins to unmask the truth. In “Housing Push for Hispanics Spawns Wave of Foreclosures,” Susan Schmidt...
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It’s hardly a news flash that many people who are widely regarded as lions of the pro-market side have gone over to the dark side in recent months. I am not going to name any names; if you are one of the guilty parties, you know who you are; and the rest of us know, too,...
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