Since I loathe shopping, I tend to stay out of stores. So it should not be a shock to learn that, as I browsed a computer store this past weekend, I was surprised to find big-box computer monitors missing from the shelves. Instead of those once-ubiquitous monsters, I found an amazing selection of flat screen monitors of all types and shapes.

And to think, not too long ago, flat screen monitors were quite expensive — well beyond my penny-pitching ways. Now those monitors are a deal, really.

About ten years ago, a reporter did an interview with me that appeared in the “Detroit News” about the Federal Reserve and Greenspan’s monetary policy.

This reporter has reprinted this interview on his blog today, pointing out my “prevision” in seeing where Fed monetary policy was leading: serious interest rate distortions, imbalances between savings and investment, and an inevitable economic correction.

ABC news provides a helpful round up of the latest national poll on national politics, in PDF with plenty of detail, that shows a continued fall in approval ratings for the Obama administration, in nearly every area of domestic policy. These polls could make it more difficult for Obama and Congress to impose health-care socialism, so that’s something to celebrate; it is also striking that opposition to another stimulus package has grown to two thirds.

I previously noted that NTP used the patent system to wring over $600M out of RIM, the manufacturer of the Blackberry smartphone. As noted by Mike Masnick, now RIM has coughed up another quarter billion dollars to another company, Visto (”coincidentally” a licensee of NTP). A quarter billion dollars--everyone yawns. Masnick asks, why did NTP have to pay Visto?

We are shocked, shocked, to read in Gotham Gazette: Unlocking the Apartment ‘Warehouse’

Two months ago, on May 16, the great French economist Pascal Salin celebrated his 70th birthday. I first met Professor Salin in late 1997, in his office at the University of Paris-Dauphine. When I mentioned that I had been drawn to the Austrian School not least of all because of Mises’s epistemology, he raised his eyebrows and put on a skeptical face. I stopped talking and he threw in with amusement, “And all of economics is for you nothing but applied epistemology.”

Here is Paul Krugman from his blog trying to deny that he was a persistent advocate for the housing bubble and below that are quotes from him just prior to the bubble taking off. ht Benjamin Lee
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“And I was on the grassy knoll, too”

One of the funny aspects of being a somewhat, um, forceful writer is that I’m regularly accused of all sorts of villainy. I was personally responsible for the demise of Enron; my nonexistent son worked for Hillary; etc.. The latest seems to be that I called for the creation of a housing bubble.

MSNBC’s list of metro areas that are no longer “contracting as seriously as six months earlier” (is that really good news?) consists of 23 of 381 spots on the map. The trouble is that most are capital cities, and it is not hard to speculate why. The interactive map provides an interesting picture of nation’s economy sinking and sinking.