Cascajun

Nick Gillespie writes at Hit & Run: We’ve Got Phoney-Baloney Jobs Up the Ying-Yang, Say America’s Mayors! All We Need Is the Money To Pay For Them!

When the history of this awful moment of bailout hysteria is written, there’ll be a chapter or 20 on the complete bogosity of what might call “the infrastructure flim-flam”—the idea that government can boostrap the economy out its funk by hiring two guys to dig a hole and a couple more to fill it in.

The causes of the current financial crisis are complicated, just wait until we start trading carbon. Lawrence Solomon writes about risk in the carbon allowance trading markets:

The ‘marketplace’ for carbon allowances will be one in which both supply and demand are set by governments, in which intense corporate lobbying for changes to both supply and demand is all but certain, and in which moral hazard — in the form of an expectation of a government bailout — is an absolute certainty. Valuing the toxic instruments created by Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, that corrupted the pool of debt securities, will seem like child’s play in comparison.”

Hat tip: Belmont Club