Thursday, January 24, 2008

Problems with Capitalism?

Mark Gilbert has an article at Bloomberg in which he blames capitalism for the orgy of credit of the last decade:

Jan. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Any banker, trader or investor asked to invent the perfect market environment for creating wealth beyond the wildest dreams of avarice would come up with conditions akin to those of the past decade. So what went wrong?

The financial community, through greed, stupidity and hubris, has fouled its own sandpit. The era of munificent money- making conditions -- gentle regulation, ever-faster information flows, freely available credit, unprecedented access to global investors and oil-enriched buyers of anything yielding north of zero -- is ending with an almighty bang, not a whimper.


The problem with our system is not capitalism. The Federal Reserve, a creation of government, created this mess, not capitalism. If we allowed the market to function rather than fixing the price of credit through Fed manipulations, most of these problems would never have developed.

I fear that this type of thinking will just lead to more government interference in the market - that will cause even bigger problems down the road.

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