Free Market Failure
I awoke Monday morning to the BBC talking about the US Government taking over and bailing out Fanny May and Freddie Mac. The BBC I've noticed, has a tendency to dispense with much of the nuance one hears from American news organizations when reporting on the USA. This is good since much of the mainstream media has become little more than stenographers for the conservative, free market mavens of our government. As someone once put it, the mainstream media is a, "wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party." Big Media is all owned by corporations, run by ideologues and by definition drowning in conflict of interest and as such, void of credibility. But I digress.
The ironic thing is that here we are with an administration that lives and breathes, "free market" and they find themselves having to NATIONALIZE two of the largest financial entities in the world due to failures and abuses made possible because of the deregulatory zeal endemic to their economic philosophy.
This, for the Bush administration, was not a position of great choice. The risk of allowing Fannie May and Freddie Mac to go under was undeniable. Now the Chinese will continue to finance our debt and instead of a stock market crash, there was a modest surge. We'll see how long that lasts, the economic news has been nasty after nasty of late and economists' optimism about the immediate future is guarded at best. I wonder what they'll determine will need to be nationalized next?