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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

I was replying to "The government shouldn't keep secrets". That's wrong - it should keep the secret, until most people are out of the theater.

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But as I said, its four months later. Government shouldn't keep secrets from it's citizens in general. You're the one who introduced the hysterical shouting of "fire." The Bush administration increased the level of secret keeping massively and look what we've gotten for it. Don't you think what happened in September should inform the decisions being made this week about the continuing bailout? Four months is way too long for this to be kept quiet. I'm glad a US representative is talking about it now but wish it had come out three months ago. Fortunately, we have a new administration now and they've already begun the change:

http://www.propublica.org/article/obama-begins-rollback-of-b...

IMHO, the best thing they could do was keep this thing secret while they figured out a way to solve the problem. Not that I think the whole problem was fixed, but this specific problem was fixed. Had the general public been aware, the problem would have been much worse, and John Q. Public would start pulling money out, and shoving it in his mattress, because he didn't understand what was happening. That's why it's called a Panic.

Also IMHO, a lot of the current economic problems have to do with turning on the news every night and seeing "how bad" the economy is and "it's getting worse." Seems like a self-reinforcing problem to me. That's what happens when you make the public aware of the "problem," when they don't understand all the gory details.

As far as the Bush-bashing, and the information not being able to inform current decision making, that's crap. The people that need to know, do know.

Unfortunately, the panic was in large part caused by secrecy, as people realized that many "money good" assets had actually been losing value for over a year, and that the government had been colluding to try to keep anyone from ever finding out.

Look up "level 3 assets".

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