The Fed has committed itself to maintaining its zero interest rate policy as well as quantitative easing for as long as the unemployment rate remains above 6.5 percent (and inflation rate below 2.5 percent). James Bullard, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, heroically dissents from this policy of unemployment targeting, which is basically a reversion to the crude and discredited Old Keynesian doctrine.
The Mises Institute will be hosting the David Stockman Seminar in New York City on Tuesday May 21. Lew Rockwell, Judge Andrew Napolitano, and myself will be in attendance. Mr. Stockman will be talking about his hard-hitting new book on crony capitalism, The Great Deformation.
There is now a Wikipedia entry on William H. Peterson available here.
Dr. Peterson was a student of Ludwig von Mises, a prominent business economist, and a great man.
Line of the day, from Michael Kinsley: “Krugman sometimes writes as if, right or wrong, his view is the courageous one, held by folks willing to stand up to the plutocrats and their lackies. But his message to all classes is: party on.”
I also like the way Luigi Zingales put it in 2009:
You would not think that there would be any worthwhile ideas in an article entitled “Bring on the ‘Helicopter’ Money.” Written by hedge-fund manager Daniel Arbess in today’s Wall Street Journal, the article contains a very good idea buried among many bad ones.
The president of the Minneapolis Fed, one Narayana Kocherlakota, decided to devote the entire 2012 Annual Report to not one but two interviews with . . . . . . . . himself. The interviews are a celebration of economic stupidity. A few excerpts:
. . . there is no record in the economic history of the whole world, anywhere or at any time, of a serious and prolonged inflation which has not been accompanied and made possible, if not directly caused, by a large increase in the quantity of money. — Gottfried Haberler, Inflation, Its Causes and Cures (1960)1
