Simple Answer to a Simple Question

Dr. Black graciously asks:

Am I the only to whom it’s occurred that monetary policy through the banking channel (as opposed to, say, actually dropping money from helicopters) is only likely to be effective if banks are pretty good at allocating capital efficiently, and recent history tells us that the existing set of clowns in charge completely suck ass at this?

No. In fact, this is one of the better reasons for advocating spending (fiscal) solutions over monetary ones. The monetary ones haven’t worked, because the skillset to make them so does not currently exist sufficiently in the financial community.

Or, as someone once observed, we have thirty major banks. What we don’t have are thirty bankers to run them.