Monday, January 26, 2009

Notes on Nationalisation

Banks, land, it's all the same thing. See here, in comments to a post on Ethiopian land reform, where two of my commenters argue (in retrospect, more convincingly than I thought at the time), that the spectre of compulsory nationalisation can have very deleterious effects ...

4 comments:

  1. ? That thread on Buiter's is content-free. Although it is interesting to see that RBS/HBOS nationalisation was the dawn of national bankruptcy for him in November, and we should instead have put them into orderly runoff, but in January full nationalisation of the banking sector is the only way to go and the extra £50bn PSNCR is fine with him.

    You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows; you need a weathervane, and Buiter's yer man. Even though I suspect he's a 90s washington consensus hawk at heart and sees the UK as a structural adjustment target.

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  2. Buiter is basically the economics equivalent of Prince - some of his stuff is totally fantastic, but he has absolutely no quality control function and seemingly believes that his every idea is worth broadcasting to the masses.

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  3. Anything can have very deleterious effects; right now the culprits seems to be excessive privatization and consolidation.

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  4. Economics Prince; a concept that really ought to exist, if possible involving Willem Buiter in some capacity (or costume).

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