Sunday, March 08, 2009

Tom Woods Diagnoses the financial meltdown

I promised a link to my review of Thomas E. Woods' book, "Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed," and here it is. While he mentions the Community Reinvestment Act and various government mandates to give mortgages to people of marginal (at best) creditworthiness, he pins most of the responsibility on the Federal Reserve's enormous expansion of the money supply after 9/11, and argues that we could get along quite nicely -- in fact much better -- without the Fed. I'm inclined to agree. Best line, I think from the introduction by Ron Paul: To blame the financial meltdown on greed is like blaming a plane crash on gravity.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am glad you are helping spread the work on Meltdown.

As a real estate analyst with a large brokerage, I've read a lot of articles on the housing crisis. There were too many gaps in the theroies until I read Meltdown. It explained much of what the data streams have shown.