Tag Archives: FinancialCrisis

The Financial Crisis: Free Markets as the Only Practical and Moral Solution

I am delighted to inform everyone that Yaron Brook will be speaking at Rice University on Tuesday, March 31st, at 7:30 pm in 100 Keck Hall. 

Talk Description: 

Virtually everyone today regards the financial crisis as a failure of the free market. In this talk, Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, will argue that in fact it is the un-free market that has failed. It was not capitalism that held interest rates below the rate of inflation,spurring massive amounts of borrowing and a housing boom. It was not capitalism that gave us Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which promoted subprime lending and helped fuel the boom. It was not capitalism that gave us deposit insurance and the “too big to fail” doctrine, which encouraged risky financial practices. These, and many anti-capitalist measures like them, Dr. Brook will argue, laid the groundwork for the financial crisis. The only cure, according to Dr. Brook, is to set the market free. But to do that, Americans must embrace capitalism as a moral system–one that should be defended without guilt.

About Yaron Brook:  Yaron Brook is president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. He is a regular contributor to Forbes.com and a contributing editor of The Objective Standard. He received his MBA and Ph.D. in Finance at UT-Austin and has been published in academic as well as popular publications, and his opinion-editorials appear in major newspapers. He is frequently interviewed on national TV and radio. Dr. Brook lectures on Objectivism, business ethics and foreign policy at college campuses, community groups and corporations across America and throughout the world.