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Financing Failure: A Century of Bailouts By Vern McKinley The Independent Institute, 2011 381 pages, $17.00
History shows the federal government has arranged bailouts for plenty of financial institutions from 1933 to 2009. Reasonable people can disagree over the need for those actions, and for the counterfactual history that would have occurred had the Reconstruction Finance Corporation not taken control of many banks in 1933, or had Congress not approved the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008.
In his provocativelytitled Financing Failure: A Century of Bailouts, Vern McKinley argues such interventions have been ill-conceived and undesirable. Moreover, he suggests government policies have been at least partially responsible for the very existence of the problems encountered by the financial institutions that sought and received federal help.
Anyone trying to understand the nature of this problem will benefit from reading McKinley's critical examination of the analyses policy makers considered (or didn't consider) as they struggled to deal with succeeding financial crises over the past several decades.
The core of Financing Failure is McKinley's blow-by-blow descriptions of important banking crises that occurred from 1918 to 2008, and the government's decisions...