Having become a fan of Michael Lewis’ The Big Short (after watching the movie on DVD), I am fascinated at how some savvy Wall Streeters found a way to short mortgage bonds which were on their way to becoming toxic securities. Granted, anyone with a brain should have known that the go-go mortgage market of a decade ago was unsustainable, but I’m not sure that many people with brains, economically speaking, still reside in the United States.
(For the record, I told members of the Allegany County, Maryland, board that assess houses for property tax purposes in May 2006 that the housing market they presently were experiencing was a bubble that was not going to last much longer, and that they should not make future revenue projections based on the present experience. Board members told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. Unfortunately, I did not buy into any investments that allowed me to make money from my predictions.)
After reading the self-congratulatory release from the White House onPresident Barack Obama’s recent executive order, this one allegedly created ‘to ignite corporate competition,’ one realizes that the powers that be in Washington are so out of touch with terms like competition and free markets that it really has become hopeless. The government foists, at best, crony capitalism on the rest of us, calls it ‘competition,’ and then blames free markets when the various crony capitalist venturesgo belly-up.
This post was published at Lew Rockwell on April 18, 2016.
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