I believe in Austrian Economics (What Ron Paul espouses) . I am a member of Nouriels blog as well and follow his articles, I am a regular visitor and contributor to the Big Picture, Calculated Risk as well as Naked Capitalism.

I DON'T believe that Paulson and Bernanke can solve this problem, you can't solve debt by adding more debt. The FED distorts the Free Markets.

What you're missing as well as Roubini and co is that we wouldn't really need regulation if weren't for Central Banks determining the rate of money i.e. interest. Nearly all forms of Government Intervention backfire. The FDIC insurance encourages people to engage in risky practices knowing full that government will come to the rescue.

The central problem is Fractional Reserve banking, unsound currency not backed by gold and silver and the ponzi scheme that is fiat money and leverage. Have you even read the articles I pointed out? Or are you merely reading the block quotes? In a TRULY free market what is happening, would NEVER have happened. Roubini, CR, Barry Ritholz don't get to the heart of the problem - The monster that is slowly killing the real FREE markets, the FED and it's copy cat central banks around the world.

From this aspect, therefore, the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

The problem I see with people like Ron Paul is that they believe history began in 1929. It did not. Classical liberal economics was implemented, put to the test during the 18th and 19th centuries, and it proved as big a failure then as Communism did in the 20th century.

Why do we have to keep re-inventing the wheel?

Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Nassau Senior, J.B. Say, Bastiat and J.S. Mill all proclaimed the dogma of "laissez-faire," the free market as the regulator of supply and demand. And by the beginning of the 19th century this was the dominant economic phiosophy in Europe.

And its adherents did not then, as Ron Paul does not now, advocate that their economic prescriptions be applied inconsistently:

It is a mistke to suppose that its creators and proponents were hypocrites moved by the desire to justify their friends, the captians of industry, while callously disregarding the sufferings of the workers. The science disregarded equally the sufferings of the factory owner who failed when overproduction periodically caused a string of failures.

Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence

But this did nothing to make the theory workable in the real world, for your "TRULY free market" is something that only exists in the minds of the disciples of market fundamentalism.

Simonde de Sismondi was perhaps the first heretic among Smith's disciples. As Barzun goes on to explain:

He had visited England and had been struck by the misery resulting from industrial progress. Why did the seemingly beneficial production of goods by machinery bring on "poverty in the midst of plenty"? The answer was: free competition keeps wages low, free enterprise makes for overproduction, which leads to recurrent "crises"--shutdowns or failures entailing unemployment and starvation.

His detailed criticism of the new society includes the observation that it splits labor from capital and makes them enemies, with the power all on one side. The idea of their "bargaining" over wages is absurd. Tyrant and victim describes the relation, yet without cruel intent of the one or knowledge by the other of who his oppressor is...

Sismondi does not oppose machinery; he rejects the idea that the economic situation is the inevitable effect of a law of nature, as the orthodox then affirmed. He saw the evils as the result of social and legal arrangements that could be changed.

Sismondi was of course only the first of a multitude of critics of market fundamentalism, and by the end of the 19th century liberal economics was discarded into the trashbin of history, where it should have stayed. But unfortunately, and especially unfortunately for the United States, Milton Friedman and the Chicago school went and doug it back out in the 1960s. It didn't work back in the 18th and 19th centuries. It hasn't worked since the 1980s when it was implemented anew in the United States. It has never worked.

What is the object of human society? Is it to dazzle the eye with an immense production of useful things? Is it to cover the sea with ships and the earth with railways? Is it, finally, to give two or three individuals out of each 100,000 the power to dispose of wealth that would suffice to maintain in comfort those 100,000?

Sismondi, Studies in Political Economy (1818-36)

What is the object of human society? Is it to dazzle the eye with an immense production of useful things? Is it to cover ... the earth with railways?

Well ...

Alan :-)

Speaking of railways... how to build more when the ones we have are going bankrupt?

MTA may have to cut commuter service

The next potential victims of the nation's credit crunch: nearly 1.5 million people who ride buses and trains each weekday in Los Angeles County. Transit officials say riders could soon be facing serious service cuts...

"The potential is pretty horrendous across the industry," said James LaRusch, the chief counsel for the American Public Transportation Assn., a trade group for transit agencies.

"It's typically going to impact the largest transit agencies," he said, "because they were the ones that had the kind of assets necessary to get into these kind of deals."

LaRusch said about 30 of the largest transit agencies in the nation have some involvement in such deals...

Cheers

You will note that I have not strongly advocated fossil fuel buses. The most I have supported is small buses serving as collectors and limited electric trolley buses.

We are seeing the first steps of what I expected. Rising fuel costs and a strained economy are putting diesel buses in jeopardy. The failure is not with electrified trains but with diesel buses.

Alan

You need to read the full article.

Cheers

Yes, my fault !

They are talking about a complex method of selling depreciation expense (useless to a gov't entity) to private investors. Loophole as noted closed in 2003, but if the investors fall through (as AIG seems to be doing) then financial/cash flow problems ewsult. I vaguely remember that a lot of non-profit hospitals did the same thing.

Another failure mode for our overly complex system :-(

Best Hopes for reading before Commenting :-(

Alan

What you're missing as well as Roubini and co is that we wouldn't really need regulation if weren't for Central Banks determining the rate of money i.e. interest. Nearly all forms of Government Intervention backfire. The FDIC insurance encourages people to engage in risky practices knowing full that government will come to the rescue.

The central problem is Fractional Reserve banking, unsound currency not backed by gold and silver and the ponzi scheme that is fiat money and leverage.

But that is not what you said at the beginning. You just said "more regulation isn't the answer" when what you meant was "The system is untenable. We need zero regulation in the sense of no banks, no fractional reserve system."

Had you said that in the beginning, you'd have gotten different responses.

Cheers