Eminent British historian Niall Ferguson appeared on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show to discuss the financial crisis and the bank bailouts. Ferguson had tough criticism for the Obama administration's handling of the crisis, saying he does not really see any difference between the actions of former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and current Secretary Tim Geithner, and that the real problem has been the lack of a consistent policy towards a pretty fundamental problem: the, "by most serious measures," insolvency of a few major American banks, such as Citigroup and Bank of America.
Ferguson also agreed with advice offered by Paul Krugman (an "unprecedented" event, by Ferguson's own admission) that the "only way to deal with these big insolvent institutions is to take them into temporary conservatorship, let's use that lovely euphemism not nationalization, as happened with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, institutions that they quite closely resemble anyway. It's going to happen; we're going to end up doing this. And you restructure them."
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Filed by Nicholas Graham
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