Meltdown

The Auto Bailout Failure 0
- October 24, 2012
A new paper from the Buckeye Institute affirms what the Antiplanner has said about the Obama administration’s “bailout” of the auto industry: it did more harm than good. “The auto bailout transferred over $25 billion in taxpayer dollars to the United Autoworkers labor union,” says the paper, “while actually hindering the kind of ‘fresh start’ […]
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Book Review: All the Devils Are Here 0
- April 11, 2012
In the Antiplanner’s recent review of Margin Call, I wrote, “No bank secretly realized that mortgage-backed securities were worthless and unscrupulously sold them to unsuspecting buyers.” The authors of All the Devils Are Here would apparently disagree. Unlike most of the books about the financial crisis that the Antiplanner reviewed last year, which each tended […]
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Movie Review: Margin Call 0
- January 31, 2012
Margin Call opened four months ago, so this review isn’t exactly timely, but for readers who haven’t seen it, it purports to be about the 2008 financial crisis. Since the Antiplanner has written extensively about this crisis, I found the movie intriguing enough to watch the DVD. The entire picture takes place during about 27 […]
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Two Ways of Preventing the Crisis 0
- May 26, 2011
One of the more common notions about the housing bubble is that it was caused by political pressures to increase homeownership. The Antiplanner’s view is that it would be more accurate to say that the bubble was caused by the conflict between policies aimed at increasing homeownership and policies aimed at reducing homeownership (or, at […]
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Market Asymmetry 0
- May 18, 2011
Along with Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, Gregory Zuckerman’s The Greatest Trade Ever shows that at least some investors were aware that the housing bubble of the mid-2000s was likely to collapse, with severe repercussions on the economy. The book (whose alternate subtitle is “How One Man Bet Against the Markets and Made $20 Billion”) […]
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Contributing Factors, Part Two 0
- April 22, 2011
Be sure to read part one first. Greedy bankers: Changes in the banking industry caused the crisis, many writers claim, by creating perverse incentives to earn short-term profits by making long-term risks. “High leverage and risk-taking in general was fueled by the Street’s indulgent compensation practices,” says Lowenstein (p. 287). A prime example is Joseph […]
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