In the wake of Bork and Posner, and Baxter and the Reagan Revolution, a consensus emerged that big could be bad, but the harm that dominant firms could do needed to be demonstrated, not simply assumed in consequence of their sheer size. Moreover, the demonstration required harm to competition. The consensus held through the Clinton Administration, buoyed by the talented economists that it attracted. The Section 2 Report is controversial in drawing lines about where harm to competition begins, but it is not hard to imagine all sides of the debate agreeing with this from the report: “Competition is ill-served by insisting that firms pull their competitive punches so as to avoid the degree of marketplace success that gives them monopoly power or by demanding that winning firms, once they achieve such power, ‘lie down and play dead.’ ” (Report, p.8)

Read the full piece here.

Cnn.com tells us the good news that “Goldman reports $1.8 billion profit,” but the totality of the information in the cnn.com article strikes me as mildly curious.

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So says Lucian Bebchuk in the WSJ…

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A couple of weeks ago, Rep. Barney Frank sent a snippy letter to Northern Trust, a Chicago-based bank that caters to very wealthy clients. Mr. Frank and some other Platonic guardians on the House Financial Services Committee were incensed that Northern Trust, a recipient of TARP funds, had sponsored and hosted clients at a California golf tournament.

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So, let me get this straight. We’re in a major recession triggered by a collapse in the housing market, itself the inevitable result of government policies, led by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to get the wrong loans to the wrong people so they could buy the wrong houses. The Obama Administration’s remedy is not to let Fannie and Freddie die a long-overdue and merciful death, but to prop them up, to give them additional powers, and to subsidize private mortgage lenders who extend yet more credit to more borrowers who can’t pay it back, thus making what might have been a temporary misallocation of the housing stock into a permanent one. Brilliant!

Read the full piece here.

As I noted elsewhere yesterday, the “stimulus” bill making its way through Congress is a fine illustration of the Higgs effect, the tendency of government to expand massively in response to “crises,” real or imagined. Naomi Klein’s “Disaster Capitalism” thesis is exactly backward: “disasters” are inevitably followed by huge increases in the public sector at the expense of the private. Anyway, if you have any doubt that the current legislation has precious little to do with economic stimulus, consider the details of the House’s proposed $825 billion package, which includes:

Read the full piece here.

There are some pretty scary devils in the details of this Detroit bailout legislation. This WSJ article provides some specifics.

Under the terms of the draft legislation, “the government would receive warrants for stock equivalent to at least 20% of the loans any company receives.” Let’s put that in perspective. General Motors is seeking around $10 billion in short-term loans, so the legislation would give the government the option to buy a $2 billion stake in GM. GM’s market capitalization — the market value of its outstanding stock — is currently around $3 billion. If the government were to exercise its option today, it would pay GM $2 billion (thereby enhancing GM’s value by that amount) and would receive $2 billion worth of newly issued stock in a (now) $5 billion company. Thus, the government would end up owning 40% of GM.

Read the full piece here. 

I had the pleasure last week of participating in a bailout panel at William & Mary Law School. The William & Mary Federalist Society, which hosted the event, asked each panelist to address three topics: what led to the current situation, how the bailout plan will (or won’t) fix things, and suggestions for implementing a bailout plan. I’ve already blogged a bit about the first two topics — here I speculate on one of the causes of the mess (Fannie/Freddie); here I discuss the original (“buy troubled assets”) versus revised (“inject capital directly into financial institutions”) bailout plans. I thought I’d take a few moments to blog about the third topic — suggestions for implementing the bailout plan.

Read the full piece here. 

Not so fast, says Will Wilkinson is this must read (and well earned) dismantling of Jacob Weisberg’s recent Slate column which has been getting a lot of attention…

Read the full piece here.