Scott Sumner recently penned  an article suggesting that the Federal Reserve needs to modernize its approach to monetary policy, a sentiment shared by many economists and policymakers. The Fed certainly has made a series of changes and adjustments to increase its transparency and its credibility after President Nixon took the world off of the Bretton Woods era gold standard in 1971. 

Medicare Part D is a relatively new “entitlement” program that provides a subsidy to retirees for prescription drugs. It is supposedly designed to help seniors, but is the drug companies that benefit most. Started in 2006, it was expected to cover 11 million, but that figure was 24 million after just one year! Not surprisingly the costs of the program have escalated far beyond original projections and are expected to continue to rise in the future.

Any Brazilian libertarian gets the same questions: What the heck is happening there? How come you have people with “Menos Marx, Mais Mises” signs down the streets? Aren’t you some kind of left-libs? Isn’t Lula, now jailed for corruption, ‘Obama’s man’?

The June 29th edition of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer led with, “Time Warner, Inc. was put on this earth not to produce Game of Thrones but to punctuate the cycles of investment enthusiasm.” Grant’s reminds the forgetful that a few bubbles ago Time Warner and AOL merged and that “announcement in 2000 rang down the curtain on the dot-com era.”