• About
  • Contact
  • Staff
  • Home
  • Essays
  • Forum
  • Podcasts
  • Book Reviews
  • Liberty Classics

January 10, 2018|Adair Turner, Central Banking, Charles Kindleberger, credit, debt, Dodd-Frank, Federal Reserve, Financial Services Authority, Inflation, The Forgotten Man

Who Is This “We” that Should Manage the Economy?

by Alex J. Pollock|

Adair Turner's account of financial markets is insightful but misunderstands the role of the state in creating financial crises.

October 31, 2017|Antitrust, Capital Markets, deregulation, Dodd-Frank, free trade

The Best Competition Policy: Free Trade, Deregulation, and Open Capital Markets

by John O. McGinnis|

Many people are worried about increasing levels of economic concentration in United States industries. As a result, they call for expanding the interventionist reach of antitrust law. That would mean encouraging the Justice Department to reject more mergers and bring suits against more companies alleged to have monopoly power.

One difficulty with this approach is that it is difficult to determine whether a company possesses monopoly power, let alone figure out whether a merger will result in more monopoly power rather than invigorate competition. Moreover, attacks on monopoly discourage businesses from trying to obtain monopolies, an effort that itself brings innovation and benefits for consumers.

Three policies would decrease concentration far better than expanding antitrust law: making our trade freer, cutting back on regulation, and getting out of the way of efficient capital markets. Together, these policies would make the monopolization provisions in antitrust law much less needed.

Free Trade: The most powerful competition against domestic firms with market power can come from abroad.

Read More

October 27, 2017|Bitcoin, Dodd-Frank, Federal Reserve, Gold Clause, Independence, monetary policy, Partisanship, Regulatory Policy

Worries about an Increasingly Partisan Fed

by John O. McGinnis|

Federal Reserve in Washington D.C.

As central banks go, the Federal Reserve is one of the best.   Much academic literature suggests that one of the reasons for its relative success is its relative political independence and freedom from partisanship. Central banks that are partisan or politicized are likely to engineer booms to elect the candidates of their party even if those booms have unfortunate long run effects on the nation. The classic case is a bank that pursues a loose money policy in the run up to the election to create a false sense of prosperity or to enable the party in power to finance…

Read More

May 25, 2016|Banking regulation, Ben Bernanke, Dodd-Frank, Federal Reserve, Too Big To Fail

If We Love the Banks, We Must Love Them Enough to Let Them Fail

by John Tamny|

Photographer: John Taggart/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Commenting on the health of big U.S. banks last week, former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke wrote on his Brookings blog that “a lot of progress has been made (and more is in train) toward reducing the risks that large, complex financial institutions pose for the financial system and the economy.” Bernanke’s observation came after Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari’s recent commentary about the need to reduce the alleged problem of “Too Big To Fail” within banking. Some readers could be excused for wondering why Bernanke would have any opinion on the matter at all.

Read More

March 18, 2016|Administrative State, capitalism, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Dodd-Frank, Mapping Washington's Lawlessness, Obamacare

De-Rigging Capitalist Privilege

by Donald Devine|

When Charles G. Koch, the chief executive officer of his family business, recently wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post saying he agreed with Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders that our economic system is “often rigged to help the privileged few,” it raised eyebrows even among the company-town’s power structure.

The online version was absolutely swamped with comments. Almost all of the commenters agreed about the evils of crony capitalism but most of them unfairly attacked Koch as hypocritical for being a capitalist himself. The examples he presented of Koch Industries’ opposing government subsidies that could have advantaged its business counted for exactly nothing. Pretty tough to crack the capitalist stereotype even when the capitalist supports one of the Left’s core precepts.

Read More

July 29, 2015|Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Dodd-Frank, Elizabeth Warren, Richard Cordray, Separation of Powers

Dodd-Frank’s Frankenstein Creeps Forward

by Michael S. Greve|

This past week, a unanimous panel of the D.C. Circuit (Judges Kavanaugh, Pillard, and Rogers—Judge Kavanaugh writing) held that State National Bank of Big Spring, Texas (“SNB”) may proceed with its lawsuit challenging the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s authority on various constitutional grounds.

Read More

December 12, 2014|Bailout, Dodd-Frank, Senator Warren

Congress at Work. Really!

by Michael S. Greve|

Yesterday, the House of Representative passed a massive $1.1 trillion spending bill to keep government—most of it, anyhow—operating through the summer of 2015. (The measure is expected to pass the Senate unless someone filibusters.) Senator Warren, the Madame Defarge of the U.S. financial sector, is very upset about one piece of the bill: an amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act that would give certain FDIC-insured banks the ability to keep derivatives contracts on their books (as opposed to the statutorily required “push-out” to subsidiaries). Senator Warren thinks this fix will spell the difference between the Dodd-Frank’s ironclad anti-bailout protections and a future Armageddon at taxpayer expense.

Read More

October 27, 2014|Consumer Bureau of Financial Protection, Consumer Credit, Dodd-Frank, Elizabeth Warren

Who’s Afraid of Consumer Credit? A Discussion with Todd Zywicki

by Todd Zywicki|

The market for consumer credit has been subjected to an ever increasing amount of federal regulation since the 2008 crisis. The Dodd-Frank Act created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to intervene in consumer credit markets and protect us from the rapacious lenders who devour household income and place consumers in unmanageable levels of debt through stealth and manipulative business practices. The predictable results have been a marginal increase in the cost of credit and its decreasing availability to lower income consumers as the CFPB’s rules price them out of this market. Todd Zywicki, co-author of Consumer Credit and the American…

Read More

July 10, 2014|

Does a Sophisticated Theory Miss the Facts?

by Peter Conti-Brown|

Michael Greve introduces “adversarial corporatism,” a new conceptual lens through which to view the growing and contentious collaboration of industry and government. Adversarial corporatism takes the conventional story of crony capitalism and regulatory capture—a story appealing to critics on the left and the right alike—and adds a dose of a starker reality: the cooperation is there, unquestionably, but so is a mutual antagonism that exists side-by-side and sometimes symbiotically with that cooperation. If Greve’s oxymoron confuses a reader coming at this literature for the first time, it clarifies a dynamic that administrative law scholars have been watching for many years.…

Read More

July 1, 2014|

The Rise of Adversarial Corporatism

by Michael S. Greve|

Timothy F. Geithner, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and savior of the free world,[1] has lamented the intractable paradox of financial crises: government must lend freely to actors who by all rights should bear the price of their own reckless conduct and be wiped out. The post-crisis years have been marked by a related but somewhat different paradox: On the one hand, the government has recapitalized financial institutions, subsidized them, and drawn them closer to its ample bosom. On the other, it has hit those same institutions with an avalanche of prosecutions. Settling these cases is very costly; one…

Read More

Responses

The New Cronyism of the Old Rent-Seeking State

by Brian Mannix

Michael Greve’s essay vividly describes some deeply troubling trends in the relationship between the government and the economy. It provides a much needed perspective at a time when politics and policy-making are nothing if not adversarial, and more casual observers succumb to the temptation simply to choose sides without asking how we came to this…

Read More

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • Next Page »

Book Reviews

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

Read More

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

Read More

Liberty Classics

Rereading Politica in the Post-Liberal Moment

by Glenn A. Moots

Althusius offers a rich constitutionalism that empowers persons to thrive alongside one another in deliberate communities.

Read More

James Fenimore Cooper and the American Experiment

by Melissa Matthes

In The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper defended democracy against both mob rule and majority tyranny.

Read More

Podcasts

Stuck With Decadence

A discussion with Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat discusses with Richard Reinsch his new book The Decadent Society.

Read More

Can the Postmodern Natural Law Remedy Our Failing Humanism?

A discussion with Graham McAleer

Graham McAleer discusses how postmodern natural law can help us think more coherently about human beings and our actions.

Read More

Did the Civil Rights Constitution Distort American Politics?

A discussion with Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell discusses his new book, The Age of Entitlement.

Read More

America, Land of Deformed Institutions

A discussion with Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin pinpoints that American alienation and anger emerges from our weak political, social, and religious institutions.

Read More

About

Law & Liberty’s focus is on the classical liberal tradition of law and political thought and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons. This site brings together serious debate, commentary, essays, book reviews, interviews, and educational material in a commitment to the first principles of law in a free society. Law & Liberty considers a range of foundational and contemporary legal issues, legal philosophy, and pedagogy.

The opinions expressed on Law & Liberty are solely those of the contributors to the site and do not reflect the opinions of Liberty Fund.
  • Home
  • About
  • Staff
  • Contact
  • Archive

© 2021 Liberty Fund, Inc.

This site uses local and third-party cookies to analyze traffic. If you want to know more, click here.
By closing this banner or clicking any link in this page, you agree with this practice.Accept Read More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Necessary Always Enabled

Subscribe
Get Law and Liberty's latest content delivered to you daily
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Close