Contemplating the huge sums needed to bail out peripheral Europe, Gideon Rachman writes that he is feeling “strangely Austrian”. I confess to a similar sensation when contemplating banks. Eighteen months after the passage of the Dodd-Frank law, three-quarters of its Byzantine rules have yet to be implemented and there is little progress on the basic problem, which is that banks will take excessive risks with taxpayers’ money so long as they remain too big to fail. Meanwhile the Austrian antidote gets little attention. If you do not like government-underwritten, too-big-to-fail behemoths, you better embrace small-enough-to-fail hedge funds.
吉迪恩•拉赫曼(Gideon Rachman)写道，一想到为欧洲外围国家纾困所需的庞大资金数目，他就有一种“奇怪的倒向奥地利学派”的感觉。在想到银行问题的时候，我也有同感。多德-弗兰克(Dodd-Frank)法案获得通过已有18个月，其拜占庭式繁复规则的四分之三仍未得到实施，同时，一个基础问题几乎没有取得任何进展：只要银行仍然“大到不能倒”，它们就会继续拿纳税人的钱去冒过度的风险。与此同时，这剂奥地利学派的“解毒药”却没有引起多少注意。如果你看不惯有政府撑腰的大到不能倒的银行巨头，那么，拥抱“小到可以倒”的对冲基金吧。