An interesting email just arrived from Poland:
I was reading Poland’s major weekly publication “Wprost” (roughly translated “Direct”) and took note of their selection for the 2008 Person of the Year, the Polish Premier Donald Tusk. In an interview, he was asked an interesting question (I am translating from Polish):
Interviewer: “In the fight with the financial crisis, are you a Keynesian or a Friedmanite?”
Prime Minister Tusk: “The problem with these theories is that they serve well in thought, but they don’t serve well in practice. If I had to identify myself with someone, at this time it would have to be with Friedrich von Hayek who, talking about the business cycle, highlighted the fact that every artificial boom caused by the expansion of credit by banks works in the end against itself. Today in the philosophy of operating American financial institutions there are too many footprints of the Keynesian tradition of regulation, such as intervention for achieving - in effect - only temporary results.”
