There’s something creepy about the impending resignation of the head of GM, in anticipation of an announced bailout of the company. Not that Rick Wagoner doesn’t deserve to go, but his departure will be used as the news to justify the continuation of a broken system.
Last year, on the last Saturday in March, Google’s white background turned black, as a symbolic gesture for 2008’s “Earth Hour.”
They accompanied this gesture with a puzzling rationale:
Here are just five of the truths lost in the rhetoric. There are many more missing from the political debates.
One: Without real savings, there is no division of labor, no roundabout production, and no modern economy. Money in the bank is not real savings.
Two: Credit requires real savings. Notations on the FED’s accounts are not real savings and, therefore, cannot provide real credit.
[This article by Juan Ramón Rallo was first published on March 16th, 2009, in Spanish for the Instituto Juan de Mariana. I translated it with Rallo’s permission.]
The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Paul Krugman has turned him into a kind of spiritual guide to managing the recovery from the current crisis. However, given that his knowledge of the business cycle leave a lot of be desired, his recommendations are hardly adequate.
According to Paul Krugman, it was adherence to the Gold Standard that helped push the United States into depression in the 1930s. What I find interesting, however, is the mentality he exposes about himself as he presents his case for wild inflation:
Thomas E. Woods’s Meltdown may be the very first book aimed at an intelligent layman that is at once systematic, analytically sophisticated, and an easy read. It is an enjoyable study of the causes, probable consequences, and ways out of present severe economic problems. In terms of content, this book of a little over 180 pages does a thorough job of covering and putting into proper light a range of relatively technical questions in relevant economic theory and history.
An interesting reflection from Financial Sense.
“Asset bubbles all have a few things in common.
First and foremost, they end badly.” —Caroline Baum (2005)
With little interest in and even less knowledge of history, the modern American finds anything he considers tragic to be an utterly new crisis of unfathomable proportions and, as befits a great nation, one completely new to mankind’s historical experience. As any patriotic American knows, we ooze uniqueness.
In his March 11 Wall Street Journal op-ed, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan tried to exonerate himself from the housing boom and bust. Even though more and more analysts are realizing that Greenspan’s low interest rates fueled the bubble, the ex-maestro himself uses statistics to defend his record.
The NYT today published the letter of resignation of Jake DeSantis, Executive Vice President of the A.I.G. Financial Products division. He’s been working 10-14 hours a day for $1, but won’t work for a boss (Edward M. Liddy) who will roll over for political hacks like of Bernie Sanders. He will give his bonus to charity, rather than see it go back into the amorphous pile.
It’s a great letter, and he’s lucky that there’s no Wesley Mouch (yet) to enslave him.
