Robert Higgs in “Monetary Policy and Heightened Price Volatility in Raw Materials Markets” provides a very good companion piece to Mark Thornton’s “Where Is the Inflation?”

A highlight:

Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher in a recent speech called for an end of the “too big to fail doctrine.” He identified the dozen largest US banks (which represent almost 70% of all banking assets) as a continuing threat to the American public. He basically admitted that all the layers of bank regulation, including Dodd-Frank, are both overly complex and unlikely to succeed in preventing future bank bailouts.

Corners not craters: A “GDP Fetish” In today’s WSJ the ever insightful David Henderson reviews Keynesian Alan Blinder’s new book on the financial crisis After the Music Stopped. A highlight:

Now that the Treasury has ruled out the scheme of minting a $1 trillion platinum coin as a means to circumvent the gimmicky debt limit, it is instructive to take a closeer. For the scheme could have metamorphosed into far more than one-time political trick to avoid the debt limit. In fact it was an implicit challenge to the much vaunted and sacrosanct “independence” of the Fed.

[Part 2 of “The Secession Tradition in America,” a paper presented at the 1995 Mises Institute conference, “Secession, State, and Economy.” Click here for Part 1, “Secession: A Specifically American Principle”.]
 

Professor Salerno, the great thing about Paul Krugman is that he’s a walking reductio ad absurdum.  Critics of Keynesianism don’t even need to point out, “Well Dr. Krugman, by the same logic, you could also say...”  He saves critics the trouble, because he’s already there. He performs the logical reductio himself, and promulgates the resulting absurdities as pearls of Keynesian wisdom.

In today’s Wall Street Journal

“Most Americans recognize the need to reduce government spending to rein in the national debt. But there is another reason to cut government spending for specific programs: If more people have less incentive to stay out of the work force, they might seek jobs and help spur economic growth.”

here.

N.B.: coarse language.