Close To The Mark

Bruce posted about a book Bad Money by Kevin Phillips.

 Kevin Phillips was the GOP's principal electoral theoretician during the Nixon and Reagan eras. He provides some revealing insights about the "invisible hands" that have been guiding the American economy since the days of Ronald Reagan:

 He had some interesting quote from it that tells my previous post concerning Capitalism and Mercantilism hit pretty close to the point. And I'm just a humble history teacher that has covered the different economic "isms" for years using the standard textbooks.

Here are some quotes that caught my eye:

 This is less a market-based Adam Smith brand of triumph than a mercantilist joint venture with U.S. government authority, strategic direction, funding support, and periodic Federal Reserve or U.S. Treasury bailouts of overextended financial institutions. . . . (bold emphasis mine)

After the financial markets' narrow escape in the stock market crash of 1987, some kind of high level decision seems to have been reached in Washington to loosely institutionalize a rescue mechanism for the stock market akin to that pursued on an ad hoc basis (by the Fed and the U.S. Treasury) to safeguard major U.S. banks from exposure to domestic and foreign loan and currency crises. Thus the coinage of the phrase "financial mercantilism."  (again bold emphasis mine)