Quote of the Day

Charles Calomirise: In fact the key, and this is one insight that I think is important in the book--it is a little different from the way some political scientists think about some political struggles, where they tend to think it's struggles between political parties. One of the points that we make in the book is that the coalitions that have evolved, let's say in the U.S. history, to design the rules of the game of banking have often been bi-partisan. In fact, they purposely have structured themselves to be fairly immune to electoral partisan outcomes. And so it's just as you would expect. If you wanted to have a long-lived and valuable coalition, you would want it to be fairly robust to electoral outcomes. And so sometimes you get a very unlikely partnership, people who ideologically or culturally, sociologically, don't really see eye-to-eye at all, but find a convenience in being allies in a particular arrangement. 

Russ Roberts: Yeah. The way I think of it is: The Democrats and the Republicans are the same; they both like to give money to their friends. They just have different friends. But they have one friend in common, which is the financial sector. And they both tend to scratch that sector's back and get scratched back in return.

- Calomiris and Haber talk about their new book Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit on EconTalk