Miron is a world renowned economist. You'll find his name in many textbooks.
Interesting thing I read today which Miron references in his opinion. In 1999, Bill Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bank deregulation bill which allowed investment banks to offer services like commercial banks did, as many European banks had been doing all along. This in effect, deregulated banking. Of note, BC signed this GLB deregulation bill even though the vote on the bill split along party lines (Reps were the majority). Bill Clinton of course, was a big proponent of providing more support and services to minorities and those with less financial means. So did GWB as we've seen in the video. Which is all well and good, but that opened the door to unchecked services and lending practices such as subprime loans and unverified income acceptance practices. This was one of many deregulated and unregulated services that allowed investment banks to purchase commercial banks over the last 8 years. I can tell you in CA that many small banks got swallowed up as a result of this and large banks such as Bank of America started to quietly offer subprime loans to people who could not provide ID, SSIs, etc. You know, as my local paper likes to call them "undocumented residents"
One thing that Clinton did recently is that he manned up and spoke about this and his involvement in signing this bill. Search "Bill Clinton + Gramm bill". Democrats are furious at what he's saying as of late. While the goals were noble, it was poorly executed by the greed of the banks and the greed of the people to get into homes that they couldn't afford and/or wanted to flip in a hot housing market. Bill has all my respect for going against the call to villify the Gramm bill and to tow the party line that this is all the doings of the Republicans and to focus the discussion on fixing the problem and not politicing. As I've said a few times now, there are many culpable people and institutions. I'm sure anybody here, regardless of political affiliation, can find articles to support who is to blame. Time to fix the mess. But i am really not certain what side i stand on. I'd probably take a hybrid position of letting those institutions, individuals, etc who showed gross negligence suffer while allowing those who truly were collateral damage to these practices be given a second chance. While that's probably more difficult to achieve than to write, something in my gut tells me that its inherently wrong to arbitrarily bail out those whom Paulson feels worthy of bailing out with a 700B warchest. Paulson is quite the smart man (25 yrs at Goldman Sachs), but to provide one person with such decision making with little or no oversite (or so i've read) is too much power for one individual.