Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'moral hazard'

Bailouts, moral hazards, and the scapegoating of the taxpayer

If pandering is the politicians’ pastime, then we owe a special debt of gratitude to those who resist this seemingly irresistible force. Today, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson confirmed that he refused to extend a £150 million government bailout to prevent Thomas Cook, the world’s oldest travel agency, from going bankrupt. Continue Reading...

Financial deregulation expands opportunity

The Dodd-Frank Act became law in 2010, adding more regulation to a banking industry that was already heavily regulated.  The main purpose of this 2,300 page act was to give consumers protection against big profit seeking banks but the unintended consequences prove to be much greater.  Continue Reading...

Samuel Gregg: Fiat Money and Public Debt

On Public Discourse, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg looks at fiat money and how today it “represents the end of a long process of development whereby governments have used their power of legal tender to use money to pursue various policy goals.” Continue Reading...

The Financial Crisis: What We (Still) Haven’t Learned

It’s over a year now since the 2008 financial crisis spread havoc throughout the global economy. Dozens of books and articles have appeared to explain what went wrong. They identify culprits ranging from Wall Street financiers overleveraging assets, to ACORN lobbying policy-makers to lower mortgage standards, to politicians closely connected to government-sponsored enterprises such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae failing to exercise oversight of those agencies. Continue Reading...

Interventions target people, not robots

Shankar Vedantam on the problems of “social” governmental intervention, including increased moral hazard (HT: Arts and Letters Daily): While it seems like common sense to pump money into an economy that is pulling the bedcovers over its head, the problem with most social interventions is that they target not robots and machines but human beings — who regularly respond to interventions in contrarian, paradoxical and unpredictable ways. Continue Reading...