Category: economics

Mandel points out that there is something mighty funny about official US economic statistics.

The NYT reports Liang Huoqiao, a 22-year-old plastics worker, joined a small group of men and women studying a 40-foot-wide list of companies seeking workers. “You can walk into any factory and get a job,” he said. … He expected his pay to double in the next five years and added that he already had set his priorities. “For sure, I want to buy a car,” he said. “Car first, …

To show how tough they are, congressmen summoned Goldman and Sach’s executives to Washington, and harshly ranted at them for selling their customers securities based on mortgages that they knew or should have known were $##%, while at the same time continuing to pour great gobs of taxpayer money all over Goldman and Sach

Substantial parts of this article are pillaged wholesale from Ryan Barne’s excellent account of the crisis, and Mortgage Guarantee Insurance’s colorful account of the crisis. I steal from the best. And thanks to the commenters that pointed out numerous errors. In 2001, the Federal Reserve began cutting rates dramatically, dropping to 1% in 2003, in order to stimulate the economy. This produced a boom, and especially a housing boom, in …

It is often claimed that the disaster was produced by deregulation.  What deregulation you may ask? Well, mostly, the dismantling of Glass-Steagall.  I don’t think dismantling Glass-Steagall caused the crisis, but it is undeniable that if Glass-Steagall had remained in effect, the crisis would have been far less severe, for Glass-Steagall restrained financial institutions from being too big to fail.  It was the biggest institutions, the institutions too big to …

There have been numberless highly successful prosecutions for predatory lending, even though there is no plausible evidence that predatory lending has ever happened in recent decades, nor has such evidence ever been presented in court, nor is it plausible that predatory lending could be profitable except for lenders who break the borrowers legs and arms in the event of default.

Bryan Caplan asked why socialism turned out evil and proposed three competing explanations.  Volokh Conspiracy followed up, and a horde of socialists appeared out of the wood work, objecting to the premise of the question, claiming that socialism was just fine. So time to re-run my golden oldie:  Why socialism needs killing fields. 

Capital controls are characteristic of third world dictatorships teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. And now America has capital controls.