Robinson Crusoe and Friday are face-to-face on a desert island. How do they interact? Perhaps Friday will hurl a spear at Crusoe. Perhaps Crusoe will clap irons on Friday and enslave him. Perhaps Crusoe will declare that they both own in common all goods that each of them ever comes across or produces on the island, no matter what.
The Mystery of Banking is a unique academic treatise on money and banking, a book that combines erudition, clarity of expression, economic theory, monetary theory, economic history, and an appropriate dose of conspiracy theory. Anyone who attempts to explain the mystery of banking — a deliberately contrived mystery in many ways — apart from all of these aspects has not done justice to the topic. But, then again, this is an area in which justice has always been regarded as a liability.
According to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), national health expenditures were $2.5 trillion in 2009, or $8,086 per person. The usual critique of US healthcare discusses how the money is spent and argues that it could be better spent in other ways.
I will not discuss how the money is spent, because value is subjective. Instead, I will show that the United States cannot afford what it spends, and, as a result, the US healthcare system is a credit-induced bubble.
Regarding my previous post Keynes vs. Hayek BBC debate at the London School of Economics, here is a nice report on the event, which took place yesterday, from John Phelan at the Cobden Centre blog:
In January of 2008, Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis announced that his company had the “rare opportunity” to buy Countrywide Mortgage for the amount of $4 billion.
“Countrywide presents a rare opportunity for Bank of America to add what we believe is the best domestic mortgage platform at an attractive price and to affirm our position as the nation’s premier lender to consumers,” Lewis said.
I always enjoy David Leonhardt’s economics writings for the New York Times. He sees and reports on interesting things. Fine. But, still, is it really too much to ask that a writer on economics take a look at the many thousands of books and millions of writings that demonstrate that there is a causal relationship between free markets and prosperity?
