Free market ideology contributed to housing bubble and economy's free fall

Paul Krugman explains how Alan Greenspan and top Bush administration officials' rigid commitment to free market ideology contributed to the housing bubble and emerging recession.

In Friday's New York Times he writes:

...U.S. financial markets, it turns out, were characterized less by sophistication than by sophistry, which my dictionary defines as “a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone.” E.g., “Repackaging dubious loans into collateralized debt obligations creates a lot of perfectly safe, AAA assets that will never go bad.”

In other words, the United States was not, in fact, uniquely well-suited to make use of the world’s surplus funds. It was, instead, a place where large sums could be and were invested very badly. Directly or indirectly, capital flowing into America from global investors ended up financing a housing-and-credit bubble that has now burst, with painful consequences.

... the next year or two could be quite unpleasant.

What should have been done differently? Some critics say that the Fed helped inflate the housing bubble with low interest rates. But those rates were low for a good reason: although the last recession officially ended in November 2001, it was another two years before the U.S. economy began delivering convincing job growth, and the Fed was rightly concerned about the possibility of Japanese-style prolonged economic stagnation.

The real sin, both of the Fed and of the Bush administration, was the failure to exercise adult supervision over markets running wild.

It wasn’t just Alan Greenspan’s unwillingness to admit that there was anything more than a bit of “froth” in housing markets, or his refusal to do anything about subprime abuses. The fact is that as America’s financial system has grown ever more complex, it has also outgrown the framework of banking regulations that used to protect us — yet instead of an attempt to update that framework, all we got were paeans to the wonders of free markets.

...let’s hope that when the dust settles a bit, Mr. Bernanke takes the lead in talking about what needs to be done to fix a financial system gone very, very wrong.