…whether government’s or private businesses’ will Big Government require before it will allow a failed enterprise to fail?

Regulators want to prevent taxpayers from having to ever again bail out big banks. Their latest idea: make the banks bail themselves out.

Previously, banks had struggled to persuade regulators they had a plan—called a “living will”—that would allow them to be dismantled and shut down if they got into trouble without taxpayers taking a hit. Now, banks are creating new structures that would allow their most important parts to keep functioning, even if the parent company has to file for bankruptcy. The aim is to avoid the kind of market chaos that could cause economic harm.

Never mind the far greater market chaos created by keeping these failed entities around, actively cluttering the market.

Make the banks bail themselves out?  Get regulators out of the way, and let the banks—or any other enterprise—prevent their failure with sound, market-driven business decisions, instead of facing a greater risk of failure by being trapped into decisions driven by Big Government regulations.  Those remaining businesses that fail will deserve to do so from their poor decision making.

The whole concept of a “living will” and a free market enterprise is internally contradictory.   Let a failed enterprise fail, and let the free market, consisting of all of its participants including the enterprises that rise from the bankrupt’s ashes, prosper.

Only in a centrally planned economy would either be tried, much less both on the same item.

Seventeen Chinese cities have imposed restrictions on buying real estate in the past week as China’s leadership tries to cool a home-purchasing frenzy that is sending prices soaring.

These restrictions come with the justification that demand is too high—there’s too much money running in—for the supply of housing that’s actually available.  And, in addition to increasing the down payment required to get into a house (which should be a bank decision, not a government one (except that the PRC’s banks are controlled by governments at various levels of the hierarchy)), the government is requiring that

families who have two or more properties [are barred] from taking out mortgages and buying more.

By restricting demand in this way, the government also is restricting the supply.  While it’s true that capital projects—house and apartment building, in this case—take more time to come to fruition than money takes to come into the demand side, this artificial restriction on demand eliminates incentive to supply.

The PRC is ignoring the fact that, in a properly free market, supply and demand do a fine job of restricting each other—and at prices satisfactory to both suppliers and demanders.