New video by John Allison on the financial crisis at AynRand.org

[DavidV]

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

View accompanying slides

The media, politicians, and even many businessmen have blamed today’s financial meltdown on capitalism. But in this talk, John Allison—the longest-tenured CEO of a top-25 financial services company—argues that this crisis is a legacy of the government’s anti-capitalist policies.

Mr. Allison uses his unique inside view of the financial services industry to show how massive government intervention into the U.S. economy—from the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 to a reckless crusade to encourage home-ownership—laid the groundwork for an unsustainable real estate boom. And he shows how the government’s response to the inevitable bust—a frenzied series of bailouts, nationalizations, and “stimulus” efforts—is only making things worse.

Finally, Mr. Allison explains the underlying philosophical reasons for the crisis, and discusses the immediate and long-term solutions. He shows that capitalism, far from being the cause of today’s crisis, is its only cure.

Cross-posted from Metablog

[dhthomps]

We viewed this lecture today (3/02/09) at the weekly meeting of the Georgia Tech Objectivist Club (unofficial, there is no official one as of yet).

What does John Allison mean about the failure of mathematical models? Is he referring only to contemporary, modern, or popular mathematical models? He specifically calls out normalized financial models that inherently under represent the far reaches of the probability distribution, but I doubt that BB&T ignores modern financial mathematical models.

Edited March 3, 2009 by dhthomps