One of my antitrust students recently pointed me to a television commercial that could inspire a great exam question. Unfortunately, I didn’t see the ad until I’d finished drafting this semester’s antitrust exam (which I’ve been grading…hence the absence from TOTM).

Read the full piece here. 

Taking a page from Rahm Emanuel’s never let a serious crisis go to waste playbook, our esteemed senators are loading the pending financial reform legislation, ostensibly aimed at preventing future financial meltdowns, with all sorts of wish-list items that have nothing to do with financial crises.

Read the full piece here. 

Let’s get one thing straight: At the end of the day, our recent financial woes were primarily caused by the mispricing of assets. A housing bubble (or, more accurately, a number of local housing bubbles) emerged as home prices grew much faster than home values. People were buying homes that they knew were on the pricey side because they figured they could always sell them to a “greater fool” who’d pay even more. Lenders financed these transactions because they knew they could sell their mortgages to federally-backed greater fools, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Eventually, though, it became apparent that prices were out of line with values, the stream of greater fools dried up, and lots of folks found themselves in the unfortunate position of owing more on their homes than the homes are worth. Homeowners began defaulting on their mortgages, many of which had been sold off and packaged into securities that were purchased by financial institutions. Those defaults caused the mortgage-backed securities to fall in value, reducing the capital of the financial institutions that held them and causing insurers of those securities (e.g., sellers of credit default swaps) to have to pay large claims. It’s a somewhat complicated story, but at the end of the day there’s a clear culprit: real estate (and real estate-related) bubbles.

Read the full piece here.

We live in a time of optimism about government’s ability to improve upon the unregulated state of affairs. From health insurance to financial markets to the types of fats we eat, cars we drive, and sources of energy we consume, there is a sense among our political, media, and academic elites that our privately ordered affairs are out of whack and can be improved by government rules. These elites rarely stop to ask whether the private ordering whose malfunctions they are seeking to correct is, in fact, private; in reality, it’s often not (see, e.g., the role of Fannie and Freddie in creating the housing bubble at the heart of the financial crisis, the role of the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance in eviscerating the price competition that would constrain health care costs). Rather than asking how government meddling may have contributed to an undesirable situation, the elites usually look for a market failure — some systematic defect in the system of private ordering — and then invoke that failure as the rationale for a governmental fix.

Read the full piece here. 

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that major institutional investors — CalPERS, CalSTRS, the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, etc. — have collectively adopted a set of recommended practices that is “rankling” private equity firms. Had I not discussed the article in my Antitrust class, I’d use it as the basis for an exam question. Here are the basics…

Read the full piece here. 

Yesterday, Todd predicted that Obamacare will result in greater government involvement in heretofore private decisions that impact health. Since the government is now going to pay (via insurance subsidies) for many more Americans’ health care, it has a much stronger interest in how they live. So do we taxpayers who must pay for the government’s largesse. As Todd explained…

Read the full piece here. 

Lots of liberals, such as Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank and folks from the Huffington Post and People for the American’s Way’s Right Wing Watch, are all up in arms over the Texas Board of Education’s recent efforts to push Texas’s public school curriculum in a decidedly “conservative” direction. As Todd and Josh noted, the Board recently voted to require high school economics curricula to cover the ideas of free marketeers F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman. The Board also called for curricula to put less emphasis on that godless Thomas Jefferson and more on Protestant reformer John Calvin; to replace the term “capitalism” with “free market system” (apparently on grounds that the former term is often used derisively, as in “You capitalist pig!”); and to include consideration of the “unintended consequences” of a number of such “liberal” initiatives as the Great Society, affirmative action, and Title IX.

Read the full piece here. 

A number of opponents of Obamacare, such as Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn, have criticized the President and his people for referring to pending proposals as “health insurance reform” rather than “health care reform.” I suppose these critics think the President is engaging in a sleight of hand in an effort to minimize the significance of the reform proposals — as in, “We’re not reforming the whole health care system, just health insurance. No biggie.” But Mr. Obama is right. This proposal is about insurance rather than the provision of health care itself. And that’s the main problem.

Read the full piece here.

Well, it looks like Congress is going to attempt to enact the Senate’s health care bill using the reconciliation process. President Obama certainly suggested as much in Thursday’s Health Care Summit, downplaying the significance of such a move and suggesting it may be necessary in order to “move forward.”

Read the full piece here.