Category Archives: Analysis & Commentary
FDR’s Depression Policies: Good Deal or Raw Deal?
On July 9, 2010 at the FreedomFest Conference in Las Vegas (www.freedomfest.com), FEE president Lawrence W. Reed debated University of Nevada-Las Vegas economist Bernard Malamud on the subject of the New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt. This is a video … Continue reading
The Committee to Defraud the World
To say now that ‘No one knew’ or ‘I was mistaken’ or ‘I was just doing as I was told’ is another in a series of lies and deceptions that have supported one of the greatest frauds in the history … Continue reading
Physics and Money
Correct me if I’m wrong Sandy, but if I kill all the golfers, they’re gonna lock me up and throw away the key. — Carl Spackler For simplicity, but also quite accurately, you could define the Modern Era with Newton’s … Continue reading
What the bond guru sees coming
What about the possibility of deflation occurring? We’re in a struggle between inflation and deflation right now. We may never get to a negative consumer price index, but the danger is a drop in asset prices and the destruction of … Continue reading
Ten Wall Street Blogs You Need To Bookmark Now
Wall Street blogs have become a serious enterprise of late affirmed by the recent acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, of Footnoted.org by Morningstar Inc., the Chicago-based fund research giant and CBS Corp.’s 2007 acquisition of Wall Strip for a reported … Continue reading
Rebooting America
Prosperity: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke can talk all day about doing everything possible to sweeten a sour economy. Monetary policy is pretty much exhausted. It’s Congress that could act – but won’t. ‘We remain prepared to take further policy … Continue reading
Happy 4th
Andy Grove on the Need for US Job Creation and Industrial Policy – 07/03/2010 – Yves Smith Steve Keen’s Scary Minsky Model – 07/04/2010 – Yves Smith
Don’t ask, your guess is as good as mine.
Austerity is stupid, stimulus is dangerous, lying is optimal, economic choices are not scalar Steve Waldman I’ve been on whatever planet I go to when I’m not writing. Don’t ask, your guess is as good as mine. When I checked … Continue reading
Bank credit is contracting and getting more expensive
AMERICA’S GDP is growing, employment is finally expanding and the stockmarket is buoyant. Yet one thing has not changed: the Federal Reserve’s monetary pedal remains firmly pressed to the floor. For more than a year it has kept its short-term … Continue reading
Are Payroll Taxes Regressive?
Social Security taxes fund a thing known as Social Security benefits. Analysts of this system consider them together in order to determine whether the program is or isn’t progressive. full article
“Of Rats and Sinking Ships”
Larry Summers is reportedly leaving later this year, and Andrew Cockburn reports that Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s acutely verbal Chief of Staff is said to be looking for other employment, preferably a high paying job on Wall Street with little work … Continue reading
Liberty and Good Government
An Analogy for Good Government Riffing off of Lord Acton’s quote on liberty and good government, I came up with an analogy that was well-received at last month’s inaugural Acton on Tap. In his essay, “The History of Freedom in … Continue reading
Beyond Sovereignty: Money and its Future
Over at Public Discourse, Acton’s Samuel Gregg has just published a piece about the future of money. The issuance of money, he writes, is often associated with issues of national sovereignty, despite the fact that governments have long abused their … Continue reading
ECONed: Sic Transit Gloria Americanus
Richard Smith, a London-based capital markets information technology manager, was kind enough to provide an advance copy of his review for the book ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism by Yves Smith, the author of the … Continue reading
Business is a necessary good
A Tale of Two Entrepreneurs NPR’s Morning Edition had a touching piece the other day that illustrated how great a blessing business can be, and just how terrible things can be when there’s no freedom to innovate, produce, and create … Continue reading
The Economics of Calvin
The Economics of Calvin and Calvinism by Murray N. Rothbard on February 18, 2010 [This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. An audio version of this … Continue reading
Bankers try to fight off wave of controls
“We cannot have reform of the system driven by what each country sees that it needs for itself,” Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, told the Davos forum on Saturday. “We need to have co-ordination – we cannot … Continue reading
2010 Warning
Bill Bonner writes at The Daily Reckoning: The stock market has not been corrected. It could easily get cut in half in the next six months. (We’re leaving our ‘Crash Alert’ flying over the building with the gold balls…until stocks … Continue reading
Obama’s Big Sellout
Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for … Continue reading
Another Stimulus?
By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. A reader at Naked Capitalism asked us to respond to a recent article from the Christian Science Monitor asking Does US need a second stimulus to create jobs? Marshall Auerback has already done some … Continue reading
The Big Government Boss isn’t going away
“Hindsight is a wonderful thing,” said Timothy W. Long, the chief bank examiner for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. “At the height of the economic boom, to take an aggressive supervisory approach and tell people to stop … Continue reading
Morality vs. Material Interests
Myths of Our Times By Paul Craig Roberts Humanity has endeavored for millennia to control evil with morality. In the American “superpower,” this effort has collapsed and failed. Continue
Meet the new leaders of banking
JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and other bank behemoths have bulked up over the past year. But they’re not the only ones getting bigger these days. Dozens of small banks that were otherwise anonymous in the years leading up to the … Continue reading
Stimulating Failure
The Job Report: Another month, another drop in payrolls. Will it ever occur to our leaders in Washington that what they’re doing isn’t working – and may actually be damaging our economy? News that the unemployment rate jumped to 10.2% … Continue reading
Obama’s Economic “Plan”: Ten Times Less Than Adequate and Far, Far Too Late
Obama’s Economic “Plan”: Ten Times Less Than Adequate and Far, Far Too Late Friedoglake McCain, who was thoroughly beaten in the 2008 election in part because his economic policies were seen as too tied to the policies that produced the … Continue reading →