Congress will hold hearings tomorrow where Congressman Weiner plans to grill Goldline executives over their gold business. Specifically Weiner thinks they are charging too high a markup on the gold coins they sell, charging an average 90% markup on the coins they sell. Unfortunately, a quick check of the Goldline website and a few of their competitors shows that Goldline’s markup is higher than its competitors but nothing along the lines of a 90% difference.
Not aggressively enough, it seems. Barry Ritholtz says at his blog that the only way the banks will ever learn is if they lose big judgments in court – a notion that seems to be borne out by another aspect of the Schroit debacle. but this isn’t true, the big banks will learn when the government stops bailing them out. If the market were actually allowed to function, B of A, which received 45 billion of taxpayer moneys, would have had to severely contract to deal with its financial problems. But instead it got bailed out. Why should it be competent or efficient?
Thomas Sowell is fond of asking whether reality is optional. As I tell my students, the economic way of thinking helps identify and define the non-negotiable constraints on social reality. Economics isn’t “one way of looking at things.” If you’re advocating a higher minimum wage or protesting free trade while taking no need of the laws of demand or comparative advantage, you aren’t being compassionate. You’re being irresponsible.
Jim Cox was born in Atlanta, and grew up in Decatur, Ga with degrees from the University of GA in Marketing and GA State University in Economics and now lives in Tucker, GA with his wife, Cherie. He is an Associate Professor of Economics and Political Science at Georgia Perimeter College in Clarkston, Georgia and has taught the principles of Economics courses since 1979. Great Ideas for Teaching Economics includes nine of his submissions.
Declaration of Independence (1776): “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”
A Pledge to America (GOP, 2010): “Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute a new governing agenda and set a different course.”
Randall W. Forsyth, writing for Barron’s early spring 2009, wrote about Austrian economists, “Their ideas warned us of the bubble; their prescription for the bust is too harsh, however.”1 Now that the NBER has announced that the current “Great Recession” ended in June 2009, after 18 months, let’s reexamine this claim.
[Excerpted from What Has Government Done to Our Money?]
To understand the current monetary chaos, it is necessary to trace briefly the international monetary developments of the 20th century, and to see how each set of unsound inflationist interventions has collapsed of its own inherent problems, only to set the stage for another round of interventions. The 20th-century history of the world monetary order can be divided into nine phases. Let us examine each in turn.
Political fundraising is dramatically down.
Austrian Economics: Application on Norwegian Business Cycles by Håkon Bjerkenes, Håkon Kiil, and Paal Anker-Nilssen (Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration)
