As I discussed recently, the costs and risks of maintaining the eurozone system are already immense and rising. So is an exit possible? Intuitively, the exit from the euro should be as easy as the entrance. Joining and leaving the club should be equally simple. Leaving is just undoing what was done before.
While it is still unclear where future developments will lead the EMU, the costs and risks of remaining within the system are already immense and rising.
Well, well, well, the Chinese economy is experiencing inflation. Overall consumer prices rose by 3.6 percent in March 2012, year-over-year, including an upsurge in food prices of 7.5 percent. Even the prices of venerable Chinese herbal medicines took an upward leap of 8.3 percent.
In his Bloomberg View column today, Economists Have a Lot to Learn from the Weather, Mark Buchanan chides economists for clinging to their neoclassical general equilibrium models in the wake of their spectacular failure to track the financial crisis.
Recent discussions in the econ blog world on whether the Fed keeping interest rates too low for too long from 2003-2005 was a significant factor in the most recent boom-bust episode, triggered by John B. Taylor’s March 31, “Policy Failure and the Great Recession,” reinforces how important and useful Austrian insights are for properly interpreting causes of the current crisis and guiding discussions of appropriate reforms in monetary institutions.
If you drive a car , I’ll tax the street.
If you try to sit , I’ll tax your seat.
If you get too cold , I’ll tax the heat.
If you take a walk , I’ll tax your feet.
. . . And if you don’t use your gift cards within two years, I’ll seize them all.
(With apologies to the Beatles)
In the Tulipmania crash the common Witte Croonen bulb, that rose in price twenty-six times in January 1637, fell to one-twentieth of its peak price a week later
From 1717 to 1720, shares of John Law’s Mississippi Company were bid up by frenzied Frenchmen from 500 livres to a high of 10,100 livres, before Law was run out of France and the shares crashed along with the value of Law’s banknotes.
As energy prices rise with the never-ending vitiation of the dollar, euro, and other major currencies, the perennial hue and cry for government intervention in energy markets is again being heard. Interests promoting these policies advocate both government manipulation of markets for oil, coal, natural gas, and other commodities, and also consolidated state control over unrefined resources, such as oil fields and mineral veins, like those in the Arctic Natural Wildlife Refuge.
