In Troll Tracker Lands Job Fighting Patent Trolls!, I noted the defamation suits filed against “Troll Tracker,” aka Rick Frenkel, by two Texas lawyers, in the aftermath of Frenkel’s identity being revealed, after bounties put up by one of the subjects of his criticism, patent attorney Ray Niro. (Whew! It’s convoluted, but all you need to know is that Frenkel is the good guy here.)
I’m slowly coming out of my post-election blues, all thanks to NPR. Why? Well it appears that the victors are already turning on themselves. That’s right, the Reign of Terror has begun, with each radical faction accusing all others of being enemies of the revolution. And, to think, the Terror erupted before any power was transferred.
David Henderson and Jeff Hummel have managed to ruffle quite a few Austrian feathers with their recent Cato briefing paper, and no wonder: that paper claims not only that Alan Greenspan’s Fed was innocent of any role in encouraging the housing boom but that Greenspan had actually managed to do something Austrian monetary economists have long claimed to be impossible, namely, solve the monetary-central-planning problem.
Quantitative finance analysts, or “quants” in the financial jargon, played a prominent role in the subprime crisis. Using a blend of mathematics, statistics and computing, they were the Wall Street geniuses who assessed the risks on all those exotic mortgage-backed securities and credit-default swaps. Their models were telling them that the risks were widely spread and that it was safe for the institutions employing them to pour billions of dollars into such financial instruments. This was supposed to be the most up-to-date, scientifically based way to make such calculations.
Even as Greenspan is condemned and blamed for the economic crisis, not just at the Ludwig von Mises Institute but also at the Ayn Rand Institute, the “libertarian” Cato Institute now rushes to his defense (nor is this the first time Cato praises Fed policy )and argues that Greenspan pursued
