> Daniel Davies wrote:
>
> >And I think it's not so very surprising that a laissez-faire type
like Andrei
> >Shleifer would come to the conclusion that a massive misallocation
of capital
> >by a free market was the fault of a few Very Bad People who Cheated
> >and Must Be
> >Prevented From Interfering In The Workings Of A Basically Fine
Market
> >Mechanism. Explaining that everything would have been fine except
for a few
> >bad apples is practically an industry in itself. It's the
explanation of the
> >phenomenon which allows him to preserve all of his beliefs about
the
> >efficiency
> >of laissez-faire capital markets and most of the facts. Ask him
whether the
> >Crash of 1929 was the fault of Jesse Livermore and the Standard Oil
crowd.
>
> I'm with you on this. These asymmetric info folks just can't accept
> systematic manias, mass outbreaks of self-deception, as an
> explanation; if things go bad, it has to be because of some
> intransparency, not a delusional misallocation. In the midst of the
> dot.com madness, Joe Stiglitz asked, the picture of innocent
> perplexity, "Why do people buy these stocks?"
>
> Doug
=================
C'mon, Machiavellian personalities are for politics, not markets.
Counterfinality is impossible in 'finance' :-)
Ian