John Stossel Quotes
Markets are too complex to manipulate beneficially.
Stossel, John. Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel - Why Everything You Know Is Wrong. Hyperion, 2006.
The mantra was not heard much after the collapse of the ‘smart’ markets in 2008 and the ‘dumb’ governments had to come to the rescue of the economy all over the industrialized world.
Arguing for less secrecy of the Federal Reserve Bank:
This rigid view left no room for regulation which is what almost every modern industrial democracy has chosen. To some of his extremist followers, any government regulation of business or the economy whatsoever, regardless of how little, means that the nation has embraced socialism. It is in this sense that many extreme right wingers viewed Presidents like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama as socialists while they saw themselves as opponents of socialism.
This quotation polarized the economists into those who thought that economics was held back by the rigidity of the scientific method and those who thought that economics was a backward science because it did not follow the standards of the more developed scientists. Scientists from other fields are almost universally in agreement and accuse many economists of making predictions and pronouncements from analyses that in other sciences would only be called guesses. The same is said of politics by many scientists.
She had warned about the unregulated derivatives 10 years earlier, but to no avail. See {637987}. Then when she had been proven prescient in the Meltdown of 2008, Congress was more interested in how she thought they could prevent future problems with derivatives. Some were adopted but not all. The financial institutions claimed that they needed derivatives to hedge positions and hence “stabilize” the system. Of the members of Congress who voted on this issue, almost none understood derivatives and credit default swaps were and how they worked. But some were sure they were bad, and others were sure that they were necessary for stability. Derivatives can, and did, get so complicated that the people who originally created them sometimes cannot tell whether they are at risk or not. Even computer cannot calculate the value and risks of these instruments because the values and risks depend on what happens to other companies or instruments which themselves have derivatives insuring them. See {620038} for a good description of the difficulty.
John Frank Stossel is an American libertarian television personality, author, consumer journalist, and pundit, known for his career on both ABC News and Fox Business Channel.
