I recently watched David Stockman's deliver his terrific Hazlitt Memorial Lecture. In the first few minutes of the lecture he basically says that there is no empirical evidence that there was a systemic risk to the economy and instead the risk was contained to these large investment banks that were loaded up with debt.
I'm wondering where i could find more details on this. Basically i want to find some good material to counter the argument that gets made all the time that if we didn't have bailouts and TARP that we would have had a great depression, etc
It seems to me people constantly assert that the government had to do these things and in doing so they saved us from total disaster. When pressed to prove this of course they can't but since they hear it repeated so often they still take it as true. I would like to find some good material to show that it’s not true. I understand theoretically why bailouts are bad etc but is there a way to make a strong case that the economic Armageddon was not going to happen if we allowed these “to big to fail” institutions fail?
thx
Bob Murphy article called "Was TARP Good For The Taxpayers?":
http://mises.org/daily/4762
And "Stimulus? Yet Again?":
http://mises.org/daily/4706
"The Empirical Case Against Government Stimulus":
http://mises.org/daily/4648
Frank Shostak's article "The Rescue Package Will Delay Recovery":
http://mises.org/daily/3131
Edit: I definitely remember an article where Bob Murphy (?) took the Obama Administrations own released projections as to "what will happen to unemployment without stimulus" and "what will happen with stimulus", and showed that even with the stimulus it did not match their projections one bit... and was even worse than the "what will happen without stimulus" line.... I can't seem to find this article though, so maybe it wasn't Bob Murphy?
Edit 2: Well here is a topic on the forums where the chart is showed:
http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/19633.aspx