Here's more proof that Captain Fishsticks, as well as the people who promote him, are fatuous gasbags:
On economic questions the standard [conservative] exculpatory maneuver is even simpler. When some free-market scheme blows up, one needs only find an institution of government in close proximity to the wreckage and commence accusing.
Thus we hear from some on the right that the disaster on Wall Street was the handiwork not of those with unbridled pecuniary motives but of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were government-sponsored enterprises and therefore partially exempt from market discipline and of theoretical necessity the sole culprits.
Thomas Frank, the author of the piece in the online Wall Street Journal, continues:
There is no doubt that Fannie and Freddie enabled the subprime neurosis, but for certain conservatives they are virtually the only malefactors worth noting. The dirge goes like this: Fannie and Freddie were buying up subprime mortgages, and they were doing it for (liberal) political reasons. Mortgage originators thus had no choice but to hand out mortgages like candy. Had market forces been in charge, loans would, no doubt, have been administered with a rigor and sternness to make John Calvin blanch.
I asked Bill Black, a professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and an authority on the Savings and Loan debacle of the 1980s, what he thought of the latest blame offensive. He pointed out that, for all their failings, Fannie and Freddie didn't originate any of the bad loans -- that disastrous piece of work was done by purely private, largely unregulated companies, which did it for the usual bubble-logic reason: to make a quick buck.
Most of the mistakes for which we are paying now, Mr. Black told me, were actually made "by four entities that under conservative economic theory should have exercised effective market discipline -- the appraisers, the originators of the mortgages, the rating agencies, and the investment banking firms that packaged the subprime mortgage-backed securities." Instead of "disciplining" the markets, these private actors "served as the four horsemen of the financial apocalypse, aiding the accounting fraud and inflating the housing bubble." It is they, Mr. Black says, who "turned a crisis into a catastrophe."
Paragons of financial rectitude. Market disciplinarians. The sober princes and kings of the marketplace. The . . .
All right, Spot. We've got it.
The Frank article appeared in several places that Spot reads, including Balloon Juice.
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