Nov 4
First Post on.... Is the Market Really Free?
As the first post of a new blog, I wanted to assert that our intention on this blog will hopefully be to outline different perspectives on world economics and hopefully by the end of it (few years?) we will have learned something. I consider myself to be an armchair economist - so invite anyone else who would like to discuss these topics to comment and contact us on the blog, if you'd like to be a contributor, please let me know.I recently heard a few interesting assertions that I want to bring up as a first topic of discussion. Libertarians would assert that the market wants to be free, and we should let it. Another source (that might post on this blog at a later time), asserted that a libertarian attitude is shared by most top government officials :
" the director of the CFTC (responsible for regulating the derivatives market) warned Alan Greenspan that the derivatives market was ripe for massive fraud due to a lack of transparency, he responded "the market will sort it all out" and "there is nothing wrong with a little fraud" because it was part of he market process." This seems to be an extreme attitude, that I'm not even entirely sure is a libertarian attitude - namely one that accepts fraud in the market as being a part of the market process. Could this be considered to be a part of even a variant of a libertarian "free market" viewpoint? Or is this just a renegade official justifying inactions through clever ideology?
