Among others, Ron Paul, in his speech to the house, proposing amendments to the laws that caused the crisis … the government’s policy of diverting capital into housing creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also …
Category: economics
Brad De Long explains he was wrong
Wrong, that is in that he failed to appreciate his own his immense genius, and wrong in that he failed to appreciate that the progressive left wing account of economics was ever more staggeringly true than he thought it was: According to him, he was wrong to think that: highly leveraged banks had control over their risks. With people like Stanley Fischer and Robert Rubin in the office of the …
Europe crosses the Rubicon
Ireland has started to issue its own Euros, or rather counterfeit its own Euros, since it has no legal authority to issue Euros – not that anyone worries about legal authority these days. If any one country of Europe can get away with issuing Euros, then the political benefit is captured by the one country issuing Euros, while the inflationary effect is experience by all of Europe. This guarantees over …
Creeping progressivism
Mc Cain is horrified when a bunch of progressive lawyers demand that banks have their paperwork in order before foreclosing. He does not realize that he has implicitly conceded everything that matters to those progressive lawyers. He complains that this will have a detrimental effect on the availability of credit: this action could have a catastrophic impact on home values and mortgage lending … … lenders are discouraged from offering mortgages …
No enemies to the left, no friends to the right
A leftist has no enemies to the left, and no friends to the right. Thus everyone that he is a friend to, is an enemy to him, and everyone who is a friend to him, he is an enemy to. Back in the day of the Soviet Union, we regularly saw this dynamic with the “popular frontâ€. The popular front, a coalition between moderates and radicals, would seemingly be dominated …
Gabrielle Gifford’s shooter was a lefty
Two down for the price of one!
Gabrielle Giffords needed killing
And so do most of congress, most of the regulators, and most of the businessmen in the revolving door between business and regulation. All the conservative criticism of her seems to be disappearing off the web, but what the hell, she stank, critics pointed out she stank, so someone killed her. Â It might have been a leftist who did not think she was left enough, but chances are, was …
High returns on IQ between countries, but low returns within country
If we control for academic qualification, there is zero or negative return on IQ within a country. That is to say, of two people of different IQ but same country and the same academic qualification, the smarter one will have similar or lower socioeconomic success. If we do not control for academic qualification, IQ still does not make a very large difference. Of two people of very different IQ, but …
about one third banksters, two thirds …
The crisis is about one third theft by banksters, one third theft by rude, arrogant, and uncivil civil servants, and one third theft by the bastard spawn of welfare moms. The split is not between rich and poor, but between tax consumers and tax payers. I have emphasized the role of affirmative action loans in this crisis, and on the evidence, the great majority of the American dud loans were …
If Keynesians believed what they say they believe …
Nobel prize winning economist Krugman tells us we need stimulus, that is to say, more deficit spending. Government needs to spend more to stimulate the economy, he tells us. Government spending puts money in peoples pockets. Then they spend stuff, so people get hired to produce stuff, so the newly employed get money too. Being employed rather than unemployed, they will produce and spend. So when the economy is in …