Why the French are to blame for the banking crisis

Uwe Reinhardt explains. I note with favor that Reinhardt offered a solution similar to what I was peddling last year: rather than bailing out the banks that got us into this mess, the government could take the same money and create new banks that would keep lending going. (I proposed using existing entities like the Federal Reserve, Small Business Administration, Department of Education, etc. to keep loans flowing in vital areas of the economy. I also proposed capitalizing healthy banks that had kept their noses clean during the boom. But it amounts to essentially the same idea.)