In spite of the smack down from Rick Santelli (CNBC's "freaked out white man") Ezra Klein, a financial columnist for the Washington Post, recently wrote an excellent piece (here) on the Late 2000 Financial Crisis (also known as the Subprime Mortgage Crisis). Klein's article argues that there is never the political will to either (1) impose strong enough regulation to prevent financial crises or, (2) once the crisis has started, provide enough stimulus to bring the economy back to full employment.
One particular quote from the article caught my attention:
It is never possible for the political system to do enough to stop them [financial crises] at the outset, as it is never quite clear how bad they are. Even if it were, the system is ill-equipped to take action at that scale [once the crisis has started].
If Klein is accurate, the theories of Keynesian intervention and of central bank control of the economy are fundamentally wrong--something to think deeply about at a possible libertarian moment in US politics.
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