Yeah. I do. I think it will contribute to the panic. I think it will contribute to the obfuscation and loss of trust among market participants.
Part of the reason we find ourselves here, in addition to basic leveraging and imbalances between risk/return, is gaming of the rules and obfuscation. The bailout is a really, really tough pill to swallow. If they had let everything fail, I am of the mind it would have gotten bad very quickly. Insolvency all over the place. Good business going down. Extremely high unemployment and overall bad for everybody.
At the same time, the solutions they seem to have proposed are just mind-boggling, and they don’t really get at the issues of transparency, obfuscation and gaming of the rules. In fact, the allocation of bailout money strikes me as the ‘ultimate game’. Enormous sums of money for the firms tapped to succeed. Process for determining the winners occurs behind closed doors. Welcome to new American economy, the national bank, and the end of an era in free-market capitalism. Utterly inane. Some basic transparency, regulation and a sense of responsibility among the bankers would have avoided all of it.
