Harry Reid, leader of the RepublicanDemocratic party in the Senate, attacks the Republican party because some far right extremists want to make “deep cuts†in government spending Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) accused Tea Party lawmakers of destroying budget negotiations “We’ve tried to wait patiently for them … but our patience and the American people’s patience is wearing very thin,” “Tea Party Republicans are scrapping all the progress we …
Category: economics
The coming collapse
Under the old US constitution, around 2000 or so, in order for the bureaucrats to spend money on something the house of representatives, the senate, and the president, had to agreed to spend money. Thus in order to do stuff, politicians had to pass a budget, and bureaucrats had to spend within that budget. Passing the budget was power, and politicians were eager to work on the budget, each one …
Radiation levels normal and falling at Fukushima nuke reactor
NPR, usually the first to panic about evil nuclear energy, is reporting some very undramatic numbers from the Fukushima reactor Radiation inside the plant is arguably dangerous, but radiation at the plants main gate is 0.647 milliserverts per hour. By comparison, when you take a flight, you get about 0.04 milliserverts per hour from cosmic rays, so standing at the main gate is fifteen times worse than flying. So someone …
Reactor disaster
The television is full of panic stricken horror about the supposedly horrible horrible horrible horrible nuclear disaster in Japan. This disaster looks like being worse than three mile island, but not nearly as bad as Chernobyl. How many died as a result of Chernobyl? Sixty people died.  Pretty similar compared to coal mining disasters, of which there are many each year, killing in total world wide thousands of people every …
Untitled
I see it regularly claimed that financial crisis reflected de-regulation. I was mighty puzzled. Deregulation? Has not Basel been a spectacular landslide of regulation, with massive apocalyptic government takeover of the financial system, with government deciding who shall be winners and who shall be losers, with government allocating lending to favored groups and away from disfavored groups? Eventually I discovered that this “deregulation†was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Bill, also known as …
Bryan Caplan’s challenge
if Egypt gets democracy, will suffer war and economic disaster, both of which will be blamed on Jews. Democracy with universal franchise does not work. It works worse with Muslims. No Muslim should be allowed to vote anywhere, especially in countries with substantial numbers of Muslims
$1,200 billion increase cut by $60 billion
From the fact that the deficit is $1,600 billion, and that the “right†triumphantly announces that it has cut spending by 60 billion, which “cut†will somehow fail to prevent the deficit from growing rapidly, I predict collapse in a decade or two – armed conflict between elements of the government, or between the government and the people, or, very likely, both. I have been making a similar prediction, for the same decade, since 1994, and events seem to be proceeding on schedule.
The Wallison dissent
Steve Sailor, is as always great reading, and he issues some comments that on the Wallison dissent that everyone who wants to understand the financial crisis should pay attention to. Peter Wallison tells us Profit had nothing to do with the motivations of these firms; they were responding to government direction. Rather than direction, they were responding to government pressure and persuasion. Basel gave government not so much the power …
The financial crisis inquiry report
“Best practices†required that the lender accept “non traditional†evidence of ability to pay – and the reason such evidence was non traditional is that it is not evidence. If a mortgage business followed HUD “best practicesâ€, as in practice it had to do, it meant they were allowing borrowers or their loan officers to make $#!% up.
Ambac argues fraud committed for profit caused the crisis
I of course, argue that government pressure to make mortgage loans caused the crisis. After all, the specific examples bad loans that Ambac lists in its lawsuit against Bear Stearns, are all loans that were made to poor people, though Ambac provides no information that would identify the race of these poor people. Ambac, however, argues that Bear Stearn made bad loans, lied that the loans were fine, and sold …