This Is Change?
Under Bush:
- Iraq Invasion: Hurry, we need this, emergency, rush, no time to argue, trust us
- Patriot Act and Related Legislation: Hurry, we need this, emergency, rush, no time to argue, trust us
- TARP I: Hurry, we need this, emergency, rush, no time to argue, trust us
Under Obama:
- TARP II: Hurry, we need this, emergency, rush, no time to argue, trust us
- Stimulus bill(s): Hurry, we need this, emergency, rush, no time to argue, trust us
Change we can believe in.
On a related note, Greg Mankiw looks at this graph in the TED spread:
And says:
[The TED spread's] decline suggests that the TARP is working and is certainly good news
Really? You get all that from this chart? I am not an economist, but I would have said the TED spread spiked up and came back down quickly in a very similar manner to any number of fear-induced price spikes, and had already fallen a fair ways before TARP was approved and had fallen a lot before the first dollar flowed (it is hard to read the chart, but by October 24 it had fallen to around 2.5). This strikes me as pretty post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. One could as easily say that the recent fall in oil prices was due to the most recent energy bill from Congress, but I am not sure even the most hard-core statist could say that with a straight face.
The longer-term history of the TED spread shows many such spikes, all of which came to earth quickly without a trillion federal dollars:
