Home > Work > Naked Money: A Revealing Look at Our Financial System
1 " Even the most complex financial systems can thrive or fail depending on whether people believe they will thrive or fail. "
― Charles Wheelan , Naked Money: A Revealing Look at Our Financial System
2 " Prices are supposed to transmit information in a market economy; inflation obscures that mechanism. "
3 " Inflation of all kinds devalues everything it infects. It obscures information and so distorts behaviour. "
4 " For as long as there have been creditors and debtors—which is a darn long time—creditors have tried to protect the value of the currency and debtors have sought to devalue it. "
5 " If average students are increasingly getting the highest possible grade, how can employers and graduate schools identify the truly exceptional "
6 " Again, a mechanism that is supposed to transmit information has been dulled. "
7 " As humans, we are really bad at envisioning the counterfactual—what might have happened if different choices had been made. "
8 " More specifically, there was no orderly process for allowing a handful of giant troubled firms to go bankrupt in a way that would not cause the rest of the system to unravel (e.g., Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG). "
9 " As former Fed governor Kevin Warsh has said, “Economics, and the conduct of monetary policy, after all, is not physics. "
10 " Stronger regulation and supervision aimed at problems with underwriting practices and lenders’ risk management would have been a more effective and surgical approach to constraining the housing bubble than a general increase in interest rates. "
11 " The 2008 financial crisis only deepened Chinese skepticism that free-flowing capital and floating exchange rates work swimmingly in a modern economy. "
12 " Voters are prone to dislike regulators in any event. Just think about the nature of what those regulators are trying to do. If regulation averts a crisis—the real goal—the public never knows there would have been a crisis. "
13 " We will just resent whatever cost and inconvenience the regulations impose, totally unaware that those precautions may have prevented a debt crisis or a real estate crash. "
14 " There are no heroes for stopping a problem before it happens. "
15 " by 2005 “more than one out of every ten home sales was to an investor, speculator, or someone buying a second home. "
16 " All accounts of the crisis document a chain of events in which rising real estate prices led to reckless borrowing and ultimately the equivalent of a modern bank run. "
17 " We want the impossibility set: the benefits of free-flowing capital without the disruptions; the flexibility of floating exchange rates without the unpredictability; and the ability to adapt monetary policy to domestic needs without the headaches caused when other countries do the same. "
18 " were a lot of bad actors). Let’s start at the bottom: too many people borrowed too much money to buy real estate. "
19 " The typical real estate purchase was far more leveraged than the stocks purchased on margin in the run up to the 1929 crash. Putting 5 percent down on a house means the other 95 percent is borrowed. "
20 " Your condo loan might be packaged with 999 other mortgages and sold off to an investor who wanted to receive the steady stream of income as those mortgages were (hopefully) paid off. "