Parry: Fed still has room to cut (Reuters): “If the economy were to underperform, we have room to cut rates,” Parry told reporters after a speech, though he stressed that he thought this was unlikely.
Bernanke, McTeer: Fed could cut again (CNN): After battling inflation for decades, the Fed has lately grown concerned that inflation is too low, hindering corporate pricing power and profits, helping to keep business investment and hiring sluggish.
Bush defends economic policies (Reuters): “”It’s nobody’s fault,” Bush told CNBC in an interview when pressed about the record deficit.
Bush offers 6-point economic plan (NYT): He offered what the White House billed as a six-point economic recovery plan: affordable health care, a national energy policy, opening overseas markets to American products, a limit on the awards paid to medical malpractice victims, a simplification of regulations on small business and an appeal to Congress to make his tax cuts permanent.
Mortgage Rates Surging (AP): “Rates on 30-year mortgages climbed this week to the highest level since last summer. The average rate rose to 6.44% for the week ending Sept. 5, up from 6.32% last week, Freddie Mac, the mortgage giant, reported Thursday in its weekly nationwide survey.”
Pierre Poujade, French Populist, dead at 82 (Economist.com): “Shopkeepers survived on low turnover by imposing high margins and evading as many taxes as they could. When a posse of tax inspectors descended on the town in the summer of 1953, the locals were in no mood to co-operate: Mr Poujade put himself at their head and sent the “Gestapo fiscale” packing.” See also Murray Rothbard’s “Poujade: Menance or Promise?”
On the Sunny Side of the Street (Economist.com): “In America, crucially, private spending has also been supported by very low interest rates, which have fed a housing-finance boom, among other things. Private-sector debt is now 180% of GDP and on the up. If America does not save, others must finance those debts, which is why the country’s current-account deficit is 5% of GDP and rising by one percentage point a year. As economists are wont to say, this is unsustainable—and so, presumably, is the stockmarket recovery.”
Facing the Truth about Iraq (J. Carroll, Boston.com, via LRC): “No one could have predicted a year ago that the fall from the Bush high horse of American Empire would come so hard and so quickly. Where are the comparisons with Rome now? The rise and fall of imperial Washington took not hundreds of years, but a few hundred days.”
Posted by Mises.org News
