Your Friends Still Think Deregulation Caused the Financial Crisis

So-called “fake news” on Facebook is getting a lot of attention.

My greatest annoyance on Facebook?

Dumb opinions.

Someone in the Tom Woods Show private Facebook group shared a post by a friend of his. It said, “[Reagan’s] deregulation of the banks is why we had the housing/economic crash in 2008.”

I’ll bet you know people like this, too.

That statement is completely fact-free, as my readers know already, but the sort of person who utters it doesn’t really need facts. He just knows deregulation must have caused it.

In fact, financial deregulation began under Jimmy Carter, and was bipartisan. It also had precisely zero to do with a financial crisis that occurred 28 years later.

Removing limits on interest rates had nothing to do with the housing crash. Neither did allowing interstate branch banking, or even allowing investment and commercial banks to be held by the same holding company (the “partial repeal of Glass-Steagall”). Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch were all stand-alone investment banks, after all.

The fortunes of AIG and New Century Financial also had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall.

Meanwhile, commercial banks got in trouble for doing things banks had always been allowed to do, regulation or no: they made bad mortgage loans.

Why the sudden cluster of bad mortgage loans, when banks could have been making such loans all along? Answer: artificial and massive interference into the mortgage market by the federal government and the Federal Reserve, as I showed in my New York Times bestseller Meltdown and my 2011 book Rollback.

As for the S&L crisis of the 1980s, that had about as little to do with the free market as it is possible to imagine. (Details in Rollback.)

As F.A. Hayek said, if you get history wrong, you’re going to do the wrong things in the present.

So we have to get history right.

If you took my government course for the Ron Paul Curriculum, you would already have been inoculated against silliness like this.

That’s one of the bonuses that Master members of my Liberty Classroom get.

It’s the greatest smorgasbord of truth you’ve ever treated yourself to.

On December 30, her price jumps all the way back up to 497 smackers. It’d be a shame not to snag it:

http://www.LibertyClassroom.com

Potpourri:

(1) The latest over at my entrepreneurship site: “The Swamp Creatures Who Inhabit Internet Marketing.”
(2) Have I been wrong about a reasonably important libertarian issue? I’m starting to think so, and I’ll be discussing it on tomorrow’s episode of the Tom Woods Show (#807).

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