Once Again, Let's Call It The Plan That Worked

From Steve Lohr in the NY Times:

"Elsewhere, government bank-investment programs are routinely called nationalization programs. But that is not likely in America, where nationalization is a word to avoid, given the aversion to anything that hints of socialism.

“Putting this plan on the table makes a lot of sense, but you can’t call it nationalization here,” said Simon Johnson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In France, it is fine, but not in the United States.”

Of course not, just like we can't call guarantees, well, guarantees.

“The goal is to get the engine of capitalism going as productively as possible,” said Nancy Koehn, a historian at the Harvard Business School. “Ideology is a luxury good in times of crisis.”

This should make me and Bob McTeer feel better.

"So when Sweden, for example, faced a financial meltdown in the early 1990s, the nationalization of much of the banking industry was welcomed. The Swedish government quickly bought stakes in banks, and sold most of them off later — a model of swift, forceful intervention in a credit crisis, financial experts say."

Why listen to experts, or idiots like me? The TARP plan is still too complicated.