Wednesday, January 6, 2010

More Financial Crisis Update

The original thought I had that prompted my last post is a thought I'm not sure I really made in the post. For the sake of this discussion, I'm assuming in the most general sense that Bush's administration and Obama's administration are basically the same, and in many ways they were in how the responded to the crisis. Bush's administration started the response, Obama, by and large, continued along pretty much the same path Bush started.

But for both presidencies, the view is, generally speaking, the system was not in general broken, that the blame cannot easily be pinned on any one entity. So, the motivation behind the bailouts is to keep the economic system pre-2006 in-tact with the assumption that many of the lessons learned about real-estate and leverageing will stick and will prevent another bubble from growing any time soon.

I think this is a bit naive and we need a modified system that is more responsive to our modified world. But by and large, I think what they did was largely appropriate and probably the only response politically possible.

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