About per capita income
and its geographical distribution in the Roman Empire.
About
militarising foreign aid (pdf).
Saudi supertanker
has been seized by Somali pirates, the
largest ship ever hijacked. Paper on
the economics of piracy (pdf).
Singapore
will allow payments to providers of human kidneys and eggs.
Rupert Murdoch
is positive about
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FDR clearly did not cause a recession to turn into the Great Depression (in the sense of the scale and length of the contraction), that happened under Hoover. The question whether FDR's policies on balance helped or hindered recovery (and which did what) is more open.
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As for CRA/Fannie/Freddie, see here. F&F didn't make subprime loans, and their share of the "near-prime" market was small and declining well before the crisis hit.
This is all one big exercise on your part in evading the simple conclusion that unregulated markets can, and do, fuck up big time occasionally.
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It is striking how there are certain similarities in the S&L/"
Thrifts" debacle at the end of the 1980s and the 2FF debacle just recently. The latter managed the interesting double of both suppressing risk (through the implicit government guarantee) and increasing risk (through regulatory support for loans to lower-income applicants). The S&L's also had suppressed risk (though the explicit government guarantee) and had as their original purpose the easier provision of mortgages. (I am not aware of any continuing regulatory channeling to higher risk applicants in their case, it was more the creation of one-way bets that was the problem.)
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That is reasoning by analogy from authority, which is a particularly weak form of argument. Especially given that the chronologies of the Great Depression and of this recession are totally different -- the real estate boom that led to the initial malinvestment in the mid to late 1920's happened under Coolidge, and the first responses to the recession resulting from Black October in 1929 happened under Hoover. FDR was not President until 1933 -- three and a half years into the Depression.
I wonder why the memory of this event gets so foreshortened? Shades of Biden's "President Roosevelt got on the TV in 1929 and reassured the nation," which was a mishmosh of three separate decades (1920's - Stock market crash, 1930's - President Roosevelt fights the Depression, 1940's - TV's start to become common). Anyway, your argument has the same legitimacy as Biden's -- little to ( ... )
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