Larry Kudlow frets that Janet Yellen simply doesn’t understand the need for a rules-based Fed model to guide the money supply and interest rates. Ms. Yellen, Kudlow informs us, should “limit her focus to stable prices and a reliable King Dollar.”
Nicholas Kristof writes in the Sunday New York Times about the decline of the public intellectual. “Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.” As Kristof rightly points out, in many academic disciplines, career success comes exclusively from publications in peer-reviewed journals.
Former New Orleans, La. Mayor Ray Nagin was convicted of 20 counts of corruption, while found not guilty on one count. Nagin was the mayor of the Crescent City from 2002 to 2010, shepherding the city through the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the rebuilding that began immediately after. But during the rebuilding phase, Nagin required kickbacks from people looking to help the battered city. RT’s Perianne Boring discusses the case and corruption in America with libertarian author Lew Rockwell.
Austrian business cycle theory explains that the “bust” phase of that cycle is created by extension of the cheap and plentiful credit by a fractional reserve banking (FRB) system. A FRB system is inherently fragile during the bust phase as its leverage (lending as a percentage of its own capital) exposes the banks to the emerging tsunami of non-performing loans and impaired collateral that are the manifestations of malinvestment.
Jeff Peshut has posted a nice article indicating the full dimensions of the stagnating recovery in labor markets. Peshut focuses on the absolute level of employment and the rate of growth of employment rather than looking solely at the far rosier unemployment rate. He shows that the employment growth rate was far lower during the Greenspan inflationary bubble years of 2003-2007 than it was in the periods 1983 to mid-1990 and mid-1991 to 2000.
On the Tom Woods Show:
George Selgin responded to my earlier post. The substance of his response is captured in the following passage
