Higher food prices set off the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and the mass protests in countries like Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, and Iran. People in these countries buy more unprocessed foods and spend a much higher percentage of their income on food, so they have been severely impoverished by Bernanke's QE2.
If Bernanke has to choose between saving rich bankers or the dollar, I am confident he will choose the former. We have good reason to expect rising prices and no dramatic efforts to reverse course.
One aspect of the current economic crisis has been the comeuppance for certai
Any theory — including any of Paul Krugman's Keynesian models — that neglects the distortion of the capital structure during boom periods cannot possibly hope to accurately prescribe policy solutions after a crash.
We are now on our third (and counting?) attempt by the Keynesians (and their occasional Chicago School comrade, Sumner) to use statistics to beat the Austrian theory.
The theory of profit/interest has major implications for the understanding of capital accumulation, the determination of real wages and the general standard of living, taxation, inflation/deflation, and the business cycle.
Conservative Republicans are justified in switching their allegiance to the Austrian economists, because supply-side monetarists have a glaring blind spot when it comes to the Federal Reserve.
If the Fed had been tracking repos in 2007–2008, what they would have seen was the unfolding of the financial crisis one full year before it went critical. Instead, Bernanke stopped collecting the data because he decided to abolish M3.
Why is unemployment stuck at 10 percent in the narrowest measure and as high as 30 percent for some demographics? The usual answer is that the broad economy is not recovering. That's true but superficial; it explains nothing. We have a problem of a specific kind with the job market.
Booms are not periods of prosperity but of the squandering of wealth. The longer they last, the worse is the devastation that follows.
