Monday, August 8, 2016

Bill Black: Thomas Friedman’s Big Idea for Hillary – Embrace Wall Street and Deregulation

Yves here. A comment in addition to the ones Black makes: The idea that risk taking is a good thing and that entrepreneurs seek risk is ideology that helps sell lots of courses and books, and also fosters bad policy idea like everyone should be able to create their own paid employment. Entrepreneurs seek to minimize risk and shift it onto others. Another name for a risk-seeking entrepreneur is “failure”.

Of course, if you are on Wall Street, and enjoy a government backstop, you want to take as much risk as possible because you get the upside and the public bears the cost of your train wrecks. Even though this ought to be patently obvious by now, the fact that the financiers have strong incentives to generate risk has been described in detail by Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England, citing Nobel Prize winner Robert Merton. So Friedman is prescribing more looting.
HRC and her strategists have already made the decision to recruit Republicans disaffected by Trump's candidacy while assuming that progressives have no where else to go and will vote Democratic as they have in the past.

Naked Capitalism
Bill Black: Thomas Friedman’s Big Idea for Hillary – Embrace Wall Street and Deregulation

1 comment:

Joe said...

Do you think the other writers at the nyt are ever embarrassed that they write for the same publication as Friedman? You can't tell whether Friedman is trying to parody himself or if he is serious and really believes the nonsense he writes.