Quote:
Originally Posted by sgtclub
They probably would have done a better job. And the Lehman BK was very stimulative to the economy (or so Ty would probably argue). Look how many jobs it created.
In all serious, I wasn't thinking just about investment professionals. I was thinking about people who deploy capital based on qualifications other than economic (cronyism, social engineering, etc.)
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I understand and in many ways agree with you on the inefficiency of goverment. But, I think you frequently overstate the efficiency of private business.
In this context, moreover, you overstate the value of efficiency, as if that were the only relevant consideration. The most cost-efficient way to build a project is often not the best way to create jobs in the US. The Bay Bridge created a fuckload of jobs, but the majority of those are in China where, for cost-efficiency reasons, the steel is fabricated. That's fine -- the purpose of that project wasn't to create jobs, but to fix a bridge vital to an economic sub-region. But the purpose of the stimulus was different.
As for the stimulus, yes -- the per-job cost was ridiculously high. I would argue that this is largely due to the amount of stimulus that was in the form of tax cuts. Targetted spending on real infrastructure projects would have been much better, but the political clusterfuck of DC prevented that.
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