In a new book entitled “Financing Failure: A Century of Bailouts,” Vern McKinley provides the most detailed account yet of the government’s decision-making process during these momentous events.

The federal government has taken over large swaths of consumer lending, most notably the $10 trillion home mortgage and $1 trillion student lending markets. The government's share of new loans for each now approaches 100%.Government monopolies in financial services pose risks to taxpayers as well as borrowers

Everybody now agrees that Treasury guarantees should be both explicit and explicitly paid for.

Last year's repeal of the final remaining vestige of Regulation Q, the prohibition of payment of interest on business demand deposits, at long last completed a pro-competitive process which began with the Monetary Control Act of 1980.  The repeal was and is a good idea.  We can easily see this by asking and answering half a dozen simple questions, to make the matter clear.

The Huntsman plan for regulatory reform is a good effort, but it fails to come close to accomplishing the one major goal that it highlights in its summary description — “ending” too-big-to-fail (TBTF).

This statement is available here as an Adobe PDF.  

In case you missed it: in a recent piece, mortgage finance and housing expert Edward Pinto writes that the 30-years mortgage could well be the cause of a new housing bubble.

Under the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law, large nonbank firms may be declared systemically important because their failure will cause a systemic breakdown. In effect, this amounts to a government statement that these firms are too big to fail.