The Randian concept of a Galt Strike is that if the elite slack off, the masses will be impoverished – that countries are rich or poor according to whether the elite is productive, while the masses and resources do not matter much, except in extreme cases such as oil rich sheikdoms. There has been a large …
Tag: money
The crisis explained
I have been seeing a lot of references to “a speculative bubble†Nope. They were not speculating. The crisis consisted of people, mostly members of protected minorities with nothing to lose, buying houses they could not afford with borrowed money in the expectation that they would go up, and if they went down, it was …
The Stimulus bill
Bryan Caplan wonders why Brad Delong cannot comprehend those who doubt the effectiveness of the stimulus bill. Assume that creating value is easy, any brainless fool can do it, even the brainless fools at Washington Mutual. It is then immediately obvious that the government can make everything lovely by printing money and giving it to …
commodity money
The subprime crisis represents massive unpunished malfeasance by financial intermediaries managing US dollars. This discourages people from using US dollars as money. In 2008 January, the fed drove real dollar interest rates negative – only slightly negative, but negative interest rates suggest an intent to inflate away the dollar denominated liabilities of financial intermediaries until …