Swedish Goofballs

When you have a mess on your hands, it’s human nature to look around to learn from others’ mistakes and success. Of course when looking to clean up a worldwide economic meltdown, parallels are, well, not quite parallel.

Nonetheless TARP overseer Elizabeth Warren felt it right to criticize that the Obama administration’s approach toward resuscitating the financial sector lacked proper transparency and accountability, resembling the Japan model for economic recovery that dragged on for nearly a decade. She instead urged the administration to learn from the success the Swedes enjoyed when they pulled their banks out of the drink in 1992.

Hold on a minute. Maybe the Swedes were more transparent, but they sure had a lot less to look at. The total cost of the Swede’s bailout was about what Bank of America alone received in federal funds. Only two Swedish banks were in serious trouble, whereas in the U.S. 360 received TARP funds. Numerous U.S. banks are global entities, while there is probably not a person south of Kristianstad who can even name a single Swedish bank. And finally, not only is everyone in Sweden is Swedish, they actually like having a government owning shares of their banks.
Here more people would call that socialism than a good idea.

Ms Warren? Looking to Sweden for guidance is like looking to your condo association’s special assessment as a model for filling New York City’s deficit.

You’re from Harvard. Certainly you can come up with better criticism than that. Instead of throwing rocks, give us a clue about how the Swede’s plan can scale up from a $15 billion solution to fit a $700 billion problem.

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