More Consistent Narrative of the Financial Crisis is Needed -- and policy now

Today, far too many people hear and believe the Dem, anti-market message that Unregulated Banker Greed caused these problems.

What is the consitent Republican Narrative?  We need the best, most true narrative to fight against the false, anti-market, anti-greed smearing that the Dems and their MSM enablers want to spread.

A great start is the Cato Unbound series of blog posts and continuing conversations, starting with a fine Austrian, Larry White on What Really Happened.

Perhaps later I'll revisit this suite of essays, extracting bullet points, and listing them.  Because that's what Reps need, the fairly complete set of bullet points about what happened.

(1) Federal Reserve credit expansion that provided the means for unsustainable mortgage financing, and (2) mandates and subsidies to write riskier mortgages. The enumeration of regrettable policies here is by no means exhaustive.

This list gets longer, and more detailed, in later posts by Larry and others, including useful dissent from J. Bradford DeLong, a prolific blogger and supporter of Paul Krugman.

But the final note by Larry i, while academically fully defensible, s a too weak political conclusion:

It is thus reasonable to think that the crash in the mortgage market was “in some sense,” i.e. to some extent, the fault of excessively risky lending by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Whether or not we call it “the dominant feature of the mortgage market in the 2000s” (emphasis added), it is safe to say that it was an important feature.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did push the lending financed by their implicit government guarantee “past the limits of prudence.

Republicans need to repeat, over and over, that the primary causes were 1) cheap money, and 2) Gov't interference in the market, pushing to get banks to lend more to risky borrowers.

Other points could be extracted as well, but the main points need to be few, and simple, and true.