The Political Tipster

My (hopefully) final thoughts about the bailout

What really annoys me about this is the scaremongering from the press and Paulson. The irony is that things are nowhere near a depression. A technical recession maybe, but even at the nadir last week the money markets were merely as bad as they were in the early 1980s and much better than they were in the 70s. The problem is after twenty years of relative stability, at the first sign of a slowdown people assume that it is 1929 again. This is the first time in history that we are going to bail out the banks long before any of them actually go bankrupt. The irony is that the glut of international regulation that is going to follow Paulson’s socialist folly (nationalised ratings agencies, caps on bonuses, IMF involved in global financial regulation) will make thing permanantly worse.