Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category
Quote of the day
Thursday, February 19th, 2009Writes Robert Higgs: These [public–private] partnerships, which epitomize economic fascism, promise to waste resources on a wide front. The idea that politicians and politically appointed “experts,” in league with rent-seeking businessmen, can allocate resources more effectively than the private capital markets is a characteristic form of the folly that is leading ...
Mark Skousen on gross output
Saturday, February 7th, 2009Frequent reader kerrjac commented on my recent post, Saving is good, not bad, for American economy with this tidbit about the opinions of economist Mark Skousen. Responding to my comment that many people claim consumption is 70% of our GDP, he said, Recently I’ve been reading economist Mark Skousen, who has ...
Saving is good, not bad, for American economy
Sunday, February 1st, 2009I was pretty angered by this Associated Press article, Americans save just when economy needs their money, by Martin Crutsinger. The very reason that Western economies, especially the U.S.'s, have experienced bubbles that have burst and left many people with dying businesses, foreclosed homes, no jobs, and insufficient savings ...
Troubled assets explained
Saturday, January 31st, 2009Uncharacteristically, I already understood this banking and finance term on my own through reading and hearing about them, but John Carney gives a good explanation of what "troubled asset" means. More important is why it is a terrible idea for the government to buy them or guarantee them; far from ...
Quote and links of the day
Saturday, January 31st, 2009On the off-chance that you haven't read them, I thoroughly enjoyed this critique of Noam Chomsky and other communist idiots and the ensuing discussion of it at Austro-Athenian Empire. Roderick Long's involvement makes just about everything into a stimulating discussion, if it wasn't already. The quote of the day was provided ...
How to create jobs in a heartbeat
Thursday, January 29th, 2009So said a headline on MSN.com this morning. It links to an article at Slate.com. Wait, before I click on the link, let me guess! Hmmm...take even more money, even faster, away from individuals, and borrow or print even more money than ever before, and throw it at government works ...
Quote of the day
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009From bumbling idiot and Obama-worshipper Brad DeLong (page 12 of the linked article): Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter led those "Austrian" economists who tried to build theories in which government attempts to cure recession caused more harm than good. Behind Hoover and Hayek stands the figure of Karl Marx, who critiqued ...
Water shortages and water-trading between states
Saturday, December 27th, 2008My former state of residence, Georgia, is in a severe drought. It has been for years. It has gotten worse and worse over the last couple of years. Naturally, only government intervention in the water market can cause a true shortage. As far as I understand it, governments in the ...
Jim Rogers calls most large U.S. banks “bankrupt”
Friday, December 12th, 2008Jim Rogers spoke at the Reuters Investment Outlook 2009 Summit: Without giving specific names, most of the significant American banks, the larger banks, are bankrupt, totally bankrupt. [...] What is outrageous economically and is outrageous morally is that normally in times like this, people who are competent and who saw it coming ...
Scarcity is not shortage
Thursday, December 11th, 2008The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. —Thomas Sowell I might only be an amateur student of economics, and a lazy one at that (I have totally ...
Barack Obama: window breaker extraordinaire 2
Sunday, December 7th, 2008From an Associated Press article: President-elect Barack Obama said Saturday that he wants to revive the economy and create jobs by upgrading roads, schools and energy efficiency in a public-works program whose scale has been unseen since construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950s. He offered no price estimate for ...
Science needs an economics revolution
Saturday, December 6th, 2008Here in the scientific research world, there is considered to be a vast dichotomy between the atmospheres and work environments in academic (university) research labs and private (big pharma and biotech) research labs. Whether it's true or not, I don't know. The impression is that in academia, you are free ...
Quote of the day
Friday, December 5th, 2008Bailout-related quote of the day: "The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit." —Samuel Gompers
Stabenow and Gettelfinger plead for bailout
Friday, December 5th, 2008On the radio this morning I heard a clip of Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow, presumably in Washington, talking about the desperate need for a bailout of the automotive industry. I can't find an article or video with her dialogue, but this is very close to an exact quote from Stabenow's ...
Question about Peter Schiff’s advice
Thursday, December 4th, 2008In one of Peter Schiff's recent commentaries, he repeats a recommendation he's made many times over the last few years: Like GM, our economy is in desperate need of a restructuring. Spending must be replaced with savings, and consumption with production. The service sector must shrink and manufacturing must expand to ...
Chrysler exec makes a visit from Bizarro World
Thursday, December 4th, 2008Chrysler Vice Chairman Jim Press said something that was unintentionally hilarious, in a dark way. "If we have a catastrophic failure of one of these car companies, in this tender environment for the economy, it's a huge blow. It could trigger a depression." He is exactly wrong. Malinvestment in automobiles ...
More thoughts on the auto bailout
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008All I hear about in the news segments of morning radio here in Michigan is how "we" desperately need a government bailout of the Big Three automakers, and how letting them go bankrupt will be a disaster for many industries other than Detroit automakers, and how it isn't fair for ...
Free markets would have no “gold standard”
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008The Mises Institute recently published a speech by Mark Thornton called "Monetary Freedom and Its Opposite". It was about how monetary freedom could be established, how it would benefit everyone except the "power elite," and how the Federal Reserve, with its monetary monopoly and inflationary fiat currency, destroy an economy's ...
Arnold Kling on credit default swaps
Sunday, November 16th, 2008Arnold Kling at EconLog wrote the clearest explanation I've heard yet of what a credit default swap is and how it could have led to so many financial losses in our current recession. It sounds like a correct explanation. Maybe it's too simple to be true; it seems impossible to ...
Peter Schiff’s predictions about Obama’s economy
Thursday, November 13th, 2008Peter Schiff needs a blag. Well, he has one, sort of; he publishes weekly commentaries at his website. I can't link to any of them, though, because they don't have URLs of their own. In his most recent one, "The Reagan Counterrevolution," he compares the relatively government-reducing ideology that won ...
Heroic Peter Schiff compilation
Thursday, November 13th, 2008The best parts are all the optimistic State cheerleaders scoffing in derision at Peter Schiff and his doom-and-gloom predictions. This will probably be the best ten minutes of TV you watch today. One of many favorite exchanges from this compilation was between Peter Schiff and Art Laffer: Schiff: It's not wealth ...
P.J. O’Rourke explains collateralized debt obligations
Monday, November 10th, 2008The left has no idea what's going on in the financial crisis. And I honor their confusion. Jim Jerk down the road from me, with all the cars up on blocks in his front yard, falls behind in his mortgage payments, and the economy of Iceland implodes. I'm missing a ...
The new president’s uphill battle
Saturday, November 8th, 2008Robert Higgs on the dire situation facing the new president: On the stock markets, corporate share prices have fallen precipitously. Unemployment is rising. Housing construction has declined greatly, and home builders are going bankrupt. Many homeowners are losing their homes to foreclosure or tax sale. Many banks and other financial firms ...
Quote of the day
Thursday, October 16th, 2008"Bush is to the left of me now. Comrade Bush announced he will buy shares in private banks." —Hugo Chavez Hat tip: Mike Tennant.
Irresponsible lending and borrowing
Thursday, October 16th, 2008I liked this post by Less Antman and the comments following it, explaining some of the basics of the housing market crisis and its role in the current recession. It is short and simple, but I appreciate that type of post or article in my efforts to learn more about ...
Quote of the day
Sunday, October 12th, 2008Via Jeffrey Tucker on the Mises blag, this passage from Ludwig von Mises's Causes of the Economic Crisis, 1931: The appearance of periodically recurring economic crises is the necessary consequence of repeatedly renewed attempts to reduce the 'natural' rates of interest on the market by means of banking policy. The crises ...
Crazy, libertarian extremists were right about the boom and bust
Sunday, October 5th, 2008Yes, I read a Karen De Coster post and wasn't immediately repulsed or offended. She makes two points I've thought to myself recently: The point being that "crazy, extremist" libertarians/contrarians/skeptics, who long ago pointed out the facts about statist policies propping up an unsustainable economic boom, are just crazy and extremist. ...
Austrian business cycle theory and recent irrationality
Saturday, October 4th, 2008I am not even an amateur economist yet, much less a real economist, but I think I understand the basics of the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT). As you know, I think it explains the boom–bust cycle of our economies pretty well (but maybe that's because the libertarian economists I ...
Quote of the day
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008"This is the way government's supposed to work, folks, and it did." —Senator Judd Gregg, R-NH, on the "Bank Robbery of 2008" How right he is, though he has no idea why.
Barack Obama, window breaker extraordinaire
Monday, September 29th, 2008Barack Obama and all of his Democratic supporters have already exposed themselves as true economic ignoramuses. It isn't getting any better. The veritable hero among knaves in the mainstream media, John Stossel, writes: Wow. Five million new jobs. All that work building windmills and creating biofuels are the "green jobs" that ...
Bailout-related question of the day
Sunday, September 28th, 2008Who said this, and in what year? First right answer wins you a free beer (if no one guesses the year, the closest one wins). No cheating! Public opinion is perfectly right to see the end of the boom and the crisis as a consequence of the policy of the banks. ...
Quote of the day
Sunday, September 28th, 2008"If a loose monetary policy and rapid asset price inflation were the route to economic prosperity, Argentina would be the richest country in the world by now." —Albert Edwards, Co-Head, Global Cross Asset Strategy Societe Generale From safehaven.com, via disinter.
Interest rates in market anarchism
Sunday, September 28th, 2008I was quite fascinated by this post by Corktageous. It contains some good rebuttals of the anarcho-socialist/mutualist philosophies. You can read it and make of it what you will, but my purpose in this post is to ponder a little bit about interest rates, a topic that was brought up ...
The bailout is even worse than we know
Saturday, September 27th, 2008I liked two rants that I found via this Chris Floyd post. The first is by Arthur Silber, whom Floyd is fond of quoting, and with good reason: ...the consequences we are now seeing are irrevocable and unavoidable. The bad debts must be accounted for and written off. A problem of ...
Learning monetary theory from Rothbard
Saturday, September 27th, 2008Murray Rothbard was a much better writer on economics than Mises, though all of his economic ideas came more or less straight from Mises. Maybe I enjoy his writing style so much more because he was an American English speaker and was about two generations younger than Mises. Here is ...
The Republocrats are ALL against us
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008Brad at WendyMcElroy.com is right on the money: If the bailout accomplishes nothing else, it may expose the charade of the "two-party" system to a few more eyes. The Democrats' excuse for supporting so much atrocious Bush legislation (Patriot Act, use of force, Military Commissions Act, warrantless wiretapping, etc.) has traditionally been ...
Learning monetary theory from Mises
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008As brilliant as I sound on most matters that I write about, my grasp of monetary theory—the financial markets, banking, lending, credit, securities, how the fiat money system skews them all—is, to be honest, embarrassingly weak. The deficit is largely in my understanding of financial jargon. I experienced a similar, ...
The MSM are clueless
Sunday, September 14th, 2008I'm glad that this week I perused Taki's Magazine for the first time in months, since I found this excellent commentary on the Fannie and Freddie government takeover. One amusing aspect of the New York Times’s coverage of the government takeovers of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is that throughout ...
Michigan government tries to fix problems it caused
Thursday, August 28th, 2008In recent months I have heard about two economic developments in Michigan that have been facilitated by the Michigan state legislature, to benefit the state's struggling economy, which had been in its own mini-recession for years before the rest of the U.S. caught up. The legislature passed movie-filming tax breaks ...
Staggering ignorance 2
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008Unfortunately, the greater the humanitarian outreach, the greater the violence required to achieve it.—Ron PaulAt lunch today I overheard people talking about the ridiculous sums of wealth that athletes and entertainers accumulate, and they wondered what in the world those hundred-millionaires and billionaires do with all that money, and why ...
African nature preserves and the tragedy of the commons
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008In the July 4, 2008 issue of Science, there was a news & views article about over-hunting and poaching of animals on nature preserves in Africa, due to the large increase in human populations surrounding the preserves. It seems the establishment of nature preserves attracts people to settle around them, ...
Sarbanes-Oxley: helps big businesses, stifles small ones
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008This is my second post in one night about how, (1) governmental regulations that were meant to help and protect...someone, presumably...actually only help big, wealthy businesses, and, (2) their supporters never actually expected them to do any good for the general public, to begin with. B.K. Marcus writes about "putting the ...
Two Mises columns that expose economic follies
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008Thomas DiLorenzo exposes the moranic follies and the total immorality contained in a ludicrous article in Time magazine about how the next president should fix our economy. I have a feeling that if I had read the vacuous Time article without knowing where it came from, without knowing it was ...
Bob Murphy on oil prices and scapegoats
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008A few days ago, Bob Murphy asked his readers at Crash Landing what they'd like to see more of on the blag. I responded with: more clear, simple, step-by-step examples of how markets work and how governmental solutions to perceived market problems (or problems created by prior State interference) lead ...
Inflation in Zimbabwe
Saturday, May 24th, 2008Maybe you're familiar with Zimbabwe's brutal racist dictatorship commanded by Robert Mugabe, its runaway inflation, its millions of starved and murdered people, and its hotly contested recent elections. Well, at least there's some humor to be had in all this, at least from our perspective as comfortable Westerners. One Ian ...
What if climate-change alarmists are right?
Friday, May 23rd, 2008Max Borders presents a pretty good case as to why State solutions to those problems are worse than the problems themselves.
The economy is worse than you know
Saturday, May 10th, 2008I must offer a small retraction and an apology to at least a small number of MSM-print journalists out there because apparently some of them still do some worthy political commentating and question the establishment on serious matters. Kevin Phillips of Harper's Magazine wrote sort of an exposé on the ...
Ecological and Austrian theory
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008I'm in more of a link-and-run mood than a quote-and-philosophize mood (read: I'm short on time lately), so here's an interesting blag post from Liberty & Power: Ecological and Austrian theory, about the similarities between ecosystems and economic markets and the disconnect between people who advocate a "hands-off" or laissez-faire ...
Hillary and Obama differ on economics
Monday, May 5th, 2008So claims David Leonhardt of the New York Times. Well, obviously that is completely stupid. He writes, For all the similarities between the two Democrats, there is also a core thematic difference between them. Mrs. Clinton tends to favor narrowly focused programs, like the gas-tax holiday, that speak to specific voter ...
Biofuels demonstrate Bastiat’s broken window fallacy
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008This seems to me an excellent example of the broken window fallacy, or the law of unintended consequences: U.N. expert calls biofuel a "crime against humanity" because of all the food it wastes and the price increases it causes, when there are already shortages and high prices of food in ...