The piece on financialization from Mises was very useful. Naturally I liked the first of the explanations he ran through, the Marxist one citing Arrighi. At the end he concludes this and other explanations fail to get at the "root causes" of financialization -- bailouts. All that is needed, he suggests, is for government to stop bailing out the capitalists when their investments go bad. Oops. Did he forget that the capitalists are the government? As long as the foxes are in charge of guarding the henhouse, the bailouts are just a natural result. Making them into the "root cause" is asking the foxes to stop being foxes. hugzu ;-p |