THE TELEGRAPH: A tumultuous week for the world's financial system ended with the London FTSE registering its biggest rise in a single day and stock markets rallying around the globe. To call this a roller-coaster fails to do justice to the scariness of the ride. The eternal verities of capitalism have been challenged by the country most wedded to free enterprise, which has nationalised its two largest mortgage providers and taken into effective state ownership an insurer with global reach. George W Bush rightly called it a "pivotal moment".
Institutions with venerable pedigrees have gone bust, billions have been pumped by central banks into the markets and legitimate practices, like short-selling, have been outlawed, if only temporarily, for financial stocks. Most extraordinarily of all, the US Treasury is proposing to create a super-bad bank that will take the "toxic" debt - the illiquid assets - off embattled financial institutions and underpin the market with hundreds of billions of dollars. Any one of these panicky, though decisive, interventions would have had enormous consequences for the financial system; taken together, they are truly astounding. This is capitalism, but not as we know it; and someone will have to pay, almost certainly the long-suffering taxpayer. This Is Capitalism, But Not as We Know It >>> | September 20, 2008
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