Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute has written a comprehensive new book on the 2008–09 financial crisis. It is your duty to read it — and it feels like a duty, too.
That is not intended as a slight to Wallison, one of the best minds on the right when it comes to issues of this sort. Rather, the book is an illuminating instance of why friends of the free market so often win the argument but lose the fight. On the one hand, we have the likes of Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Barney Frank, the Occupy clown show, etc., doing a sort of John Adams chorus: “Greed! Greed! Billionaires! Greed! Greed! Wall Street Greed!” And the response from the responsible Right is: “Because most PMBS held by financial institutions were rated AAA, they were used by many banks and other financial firms for short-term collateralized borrowing through repurchase agreements,” a sentence that appears in the introduction (!) to Wallison’s book.
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