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.
吉狄恩•拉赫曼(Gideon Rachman)寫道，一想到爲歐洲外圍國家紓困所需的龐大資金數目，他就有一種「奇怪的倒向奧地利學派」的感覺。在想到銀行問題的時候，我也有同感。多德-弗蘭克(Dodd-Frank)法案獲得通過已有18個月，其拜占庭式繁複規則的四分之三仍未得到實施，同時，一個基礎問題幾乎沒有取得任何進展：只要銀行仍然「大到不能倒」，它們就會繼續拿納稅人的錢去冒過度的風險。與此同時，這劑奧地利學派的「解毒藥」卻沒有引起多少注意。如果你看不慣有政府撐腰的大到不能倒的銀行巨擘，那麼，擁抱「小到可以倒」的對沖基金吧。