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.

Trying for accountability

Peggy Noonan has an interesting piece in the WSJ, contrasting the way the Marines handled the plane crash near Miramar in December -- complete investigation, identifying mistakes, naming names, suspending or firing people responsible, doing it in public -- and contrasting it with the financiual crisis, where pretty much nobody took anything resembling personal responsibility.

If you want to know who really was responsible, however, I would recommend reading Thomas E. Woods' new book, "Meltdown." I'll link to the review I did for the Register when they put it up.