QOTD

Reviewing John Taylor's book "Getting Off Track", David Henderson says this in Forbes:

Throughout 2007 and 2008, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and others in policy-making positions assumed that the problem was that the financial system lacked liquidity, and virtually all their actions were calculated to inject more liquidity. But Taylor gives evidence, which he garnered with economist John Williams, that liquidity was not a problem. The problem, writes Taylor, was "counterparty risk." Taylor compares finance to the game of Hearts. In Hearts, you don't want to get stuck with the queen of spades. The queens of spades in finance, he writes, "were the securities with bad mortgages in them" and "people didn't know where they were." Increasing liquidity by increasing the money supply does nothing to solve that problem.

(via EconLog)