Carney on the “Year of the Bailout”

Following Iain Murray’s farewell to 2008’s bailout-o-rama, Former CEI Brookes Fellow Tim Carney, in his Washington Examiner column, bids farewell to “The Year of the Bailout”:

Americans used to get exorcised any time the federal government considered bailing out private interests. When Chrysler got a $1.5 billion loan in 1979 (about $4.25 billion in today’s dollars), there was an outcry. When the Clinton administration bailed out Wall Street bankers in 1994 with a bailout of the Mexican peso, it was scandalous.

But as 2008 wound down, we got bailouts so large and in such rapid succession that we never had time to catch our breath.

Unfortunately, there’s probably more to come.

For more on bailouts, see the site (co-sponsored by CEI) BeyondBailouts.org.

Happy New Year!