From last night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On the president’s financial speech on the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse:

Essentially what got us away from the brink — we’re not out of the woods, but we’re off the precipice — was the substitution of U.S. government debt for private debt, which was lousy. That is essentially the whole story.
And in the end, people believed in the dollar and in the U.S. government’s faith and credit, and as it was substituted for bad debt, it stabilized the system.
The problem is this: Even though the government is beginning to wind down, even though credit is flowing and, in part, the government is withdrawing the explicit guarantees — for instance, at the end of the month, the guarantees to money market funds is going to expire– those are explicit guarantees. The problem is that everybody understands that the implicit guarantees are still in place.
Nobody will say it but everyone understands it. The government is not going to allow the money markets to fail — the way it did last September when they [money market funds] were in trouble and they [US government agencies] were guaranteeing it.
It will not allow a huge bank to fail even though it’s [that guarantee is] not explicit.
So in a sense, the government is still hanging behind. It is almost like the situation of a Freddie and Fannie before the crash. Everybody understood it was an implicit guarantee .
So you had all these nominally private institutions with the government standing behind. That’s why I think in principle regulation is a good idea. It’s got to be good and smart and targeted regulation, but I’m not against it in industries which are not truly independent and where the government is the bailer out of last resort — and it still is in the financial industry.

On the U.S. leveling tariffs on Chinese tires:

The way that the president has presented it is really remarkable. He doesn’t lie. He is too smart. He deceives.
This is incredibly deceptive. He said, as we just heard, he says — all I’m doing here is enforcing trade agreements. That would make you think that the Chinese have done something wrong, that they had dumped a product or they had undercut or subsidized. In fact, not.
This provision in the tariffs on tires are treated entirely by the U.S. Trade Act section 425 which allows the slapping on of a tariff simply in response to a surge of imports, even if it’s not illegal or done underhandedly — simply a surge. We have had a surge of imports. So it is not as if the Chinese are in violation of anything.
What is the effect of it [the tariff]? It is only done in the name of unions. The tire companies are against the tariffs. The unions are trying to protect jobs.
The problem is it’s not going to protect jobs. If you cut off the Chinese imports, it will come out of Indonesia and Brazil and Vietnam. So it’s not going to help. It is going to increase the price of the low-end tires, [thus] hurt the poor, and, in the end, it could spark a trade war.
It is a dumb policy. And it is a payoff to a special interest, nothing more than that.