Apparently, Secretary Geithner is going to China this weekend. In part, he’s going to be there to tell China to stop exporting so much.

Which, of course, raises a serious question. If China stops exporting (as much) to the US, where will they get the dollars to lend our government so that we can repair our crumbling roads and bridges?
The rather obvious effect: we’re going to have to get the money some other way.

During Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, the mantras were hope and change and the imagery was that with him in charge, faith in government would be justified. But what America has mainly seen since his inauguration is fear.

[This article is excerpted from chapter 15 of Human Action.]

The new Case-Shiller housing price data was recently released, and cities like Los Angeles are still reporting housing price declines of 22 percent. Miami is down almost 29 percent.

S & P’s spokesman declared that “we see no evidence that a recovery in home prices has begun.”

Peter Schiff is famed for being the most vocal financial economist to have perfectly predicted the crash. At the Austrian Scholars Conference in March, Schiff gave the Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture on why the meltdown surprised seemingly everyone when it should have surprised no one. His talk is available here in audio, video, and as a Mises Daily.

In a previous article, I argued that Paul Krugman’s recent articles in support of government efforts to mitigate climate change — and in particular the Waxman-Markey legislation pending in Congress — were typically misleading.

What Goes Straight Up?

Graphs of economic statistics usually meander across the page like a walk through the forest; others will wiggle up and down with the business cycle like an EKG machine. Only recently have we been confronted with statistics that shoot up vertically, like a lie on a polygraph test.