Banana redux

At Cato Unbound there is a symposium about the roots of the financial crisis, with several notable contributors.  To sum up my view again, I agree that government had many bad policies, many of those policies made the crisis worse, and that such policies should make us despair at the quality of government as regulator, past, present, and future.  But still markets must bear a very considerable share of the blame.  Bryan Caplan reminds me of my banana post, excerpted for your convenience:

Let’s say that the government subsidized the price of bananas, you bought so many bananas, put them on your roof, and then the roof collapsed.  Is that government failure or market failure?  The price was distorted, but I still say this is mostly market failure.  No one made you put so many bananas on your roof.

If Minsky and Hayek are running in a race for interpreting the last two years of the U.S. macroeconomy, Hayek has something to offer but so far Minsky is in the lead.

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