Ford is busy touting the latest Consumer Reports ratings. It is entirely understandable. Ford (F) managed to achieve an expected reliability rating of “average or better than average” for 90% of its vehicles by 2010. Contrast this with GM’s pitiful 44% of vehicles achieving the same rating and Chrysler’s abysmal 38%.

Physicist Howard Hayden, a staunch advocate of sound energy policy, sent me a copy of his letter to the EPA about global warming. The text is also appended below, with permission.

[This article originally appeared in Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Fall 1999), pp. 3–51. It is also reprinted in A History of Money and Banking in the United States and as a monograph.]

I’m not sure if Holman Jenkins has been good all along, even in 2008, on the bailout and stimulus issue, but he sure is good now:

Members of the Obama administration have taken turns deploring the billions of dollars in year-end bonuses the finance industry is getting ready to hand out. Never mentioned is what they think firms should do with the money. Give it back to their customers? Spend it on office decorations?

For good economists, the link between the operation of a fractional-reserve banking system and the recurrence of boom-bust cycles is of little doubt. One of the paramount figures who has contributed to the intellectual elaboration of this relationship and to its transmission to young economists, among which the present writer has had the pleasure to count himself, is Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe.