Academic

The Emergency Gets Institutionalized

By Gordon Smith, Christine, Hurt, Vic Fleischer, Fred Tung, Lisa Fairfax, David Zaring

The Fed has extended the lives of all of those emergency funding programs devised in the fall - backstops for commercial paper, money market funds, primary dealers (read: investment banks not yet clearly bank holding companies) and short-duration securities - for six more months.  I'm no believer in the empire-building hypothesis of ever expanding efforts to build regulatory turf, but it's hard to stop a market intervention once you've done it by fiat, no?

Full post as published by Conglomerate on February 03, 2009 (boomark / email).