Why Governments Can’t Stop Market Crashes
NEIL REYNOLDS
Globe and Mail Update
January 7, 2009 at 6:00 AM EST
Vernon Smith, the American economist who won a Nobel Prize in 2002 for his laboratory scrutiny of abstract economic theory, demonstrated that you can’t end market crashes by imposing more government regulations. Born to a poor Kansas farm family on Jan. 1, 1927, he turned 82 last week. His early life was inextricably shaped by the Great Depression – by hardships that provided an enduring incentive to succeed. (As a child, one of his chores was to keep the woodstove in the kitchen supplied with dried corncobs and dried cow chips.) “Like many of my generation,” he says in his unassuming autobiography, posted on Nobelprize.org, “I am a product of strange circumstances of survival and of successes built on tragedy.” Continue Reading »
