Interviews With Eugene Fama and John Cochrane

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2010/01/interviews-with-eugene-fama-and-john-cochrane

The New Yorker has a lively interview with the University of Chicago's Eugene Fama: "I didn't renew my subscription to The Economist because they use the world bubble three times on every page. Any time prices went up and down—I guess that is what they call a bubble."

And: "The experiment we never ran is, suppose the government stepped aside and let these institutions fail. How long would it have taken to have unscrambled everything and figured everything out? My guess is that we are talking a week or two. But the problems that were generated by the government stepping in—those are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. Now, maybe it would have been horrendous if the government didn't step in, but we'll never know. I think we could have figured it out in a week or two."

There's also a New Yorker interview with the University of Chicago's John Cochrane: "I've been on the record saying that the TARP policy and the TARP idea—that the key to stabilizing the system was buying up mortgage-backed securities on the secondary market—was a bad idea. Those speeches provoked the panic, probably more than the fact of Lehman going under. When you get the President going on national television and saying, 'The financial markets are near collapse,'...if you weren't about to take all of your short-term debt out of Citigroup, you are going to do so now."

by Editor  |  Jan 14, 2010 at 10:33 am Related Topics:  Banking, Capital Markets Regulation, Press receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list