Feed on
Posts
Comments

Is of course, the government, right? Here is Michael Crichton analyzing the “end of the world market failure du jour 1999” Y2K problem:

So governments can congratulate themselves! The only problem is, they have no reason to congratulate themselves, because governments didn’t solve this problem. The US government spent 6 billion dollars. But Citibank alone spent nearly 1 billion. And total US expenditures were on the order of 100 billion, which means the government spent 6% of the total needed to fix the problem.

Would Citibank have spent the money to fix its Y2K problem without government urging? Of course, because not to do so would have put them out of business. The same is true of other banks and businesses around the world. Yet government takes the credit.

The asymmetry between taking credit on the upside (when market failures get fixed) and bearing no responsibility on the downside (when markets “fail”) seems to be a common them in our government. Where have I heard about such things recently?

10 Responses to “The Solution for Market Failures”

  1. 198051 812131Youd outstanding guidelines there. I did a search about the field and identified that very likely the majority will agree together with your internet page. 375071

  2. 894916 997089Really interesting info !Perfect just what I was looking for! 518554

  3. cam girls says:

    890449 445618I see something genuinely special in this site . 851309

  4. 546686 319310Nice internet site, good and simple on the eyes and excellent content material too. Do you need to have many drafts to make a post? 904078

  5. 800129 993606Hello. excellent job. I did not anticipate this. This is a splendid story. Thanks! You made certain fine points there. I did a search on the subject matter and identified the majority of folks will have exactly the same opinion with your blog. 416756

  6. 594178 162162Hi there! Wonderful stuff, please do tell me when you lastly post something like that! 114497

  7. check out says:

    835678 827644I got what you intend,bookmarked , really decent web site. 733085

  8. 679105 747754quite good put up, i surely really like this web web site, carry on it 41566

  9. 213327 187564Its not that I want to duplicate your website, but I genuinely like the style. Could you tell me which style are you using? Or was it custom made? 298181

  10. BAUC says:

    148867 579890Real great information can be identified on internet weblog . 942909

Leave a Reply