Bill Black — Paul Krugman and Holman Jenkins Shill for the Giant Banks

Holman Jenkins, the ultra-conservative Wall Street Journal columnist who specializes in global climate change denial and elite financial fraud denial, has written recently to join Paul Krugman in defending the systemically dangerous banks. Jenkins is a member of the WSJ’s loopy editorial board. Jenkins’ title was “Big Banks Aren’t the Problem.” Jenkins’ thesis raises obvious and vital questions – he ignores each of them because answering them would falsify his thesis.

The 2008 crisis did not begin in a handful of too-big-to-fail banks, but in incentives cast far and wide among home buyers, mortgage brokers, lenders and others to underwrite tax-advantaged, one-way bets on home prices.

I wrote this during Passover, so I followed the tradition of asking four questions.

1. 
   
2. When did “the 2008 crisis” “begin?”
3. Who created the “incentives?”
4. Why did they create the “incentives?”
5. Who had “one-way” incentives?

New Economic Perspectives
Paul Krugman and Holman Jenkins Shill for the Giant Banks
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC