[Cross-posted at Organizations and Markets]

Cato’s new Center for Promotion of Human Rights Launches Innovative Web-based Freedom Programs for World Audience. This includes “six innovative foreign-language web-based programs” designed “to promote libertarian ideas and policies around the world”. “These new programs will publish in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Persian, Kurdish, and on the continent of Africa in English and Swahili.

The turmoil in the US subprime mortgage market has developed into an international credit crisis. It is eroding investor confidence in credit and credit-related products and, most important, raising concerns about the solidity of the banking sector, as evidenced by banks’ elevated funding terms and diminished stock prices. As a direct response to the credit crisis, the US Federal Reserve Bank first paired the Federal Funds Target Rate twice — by 50bp on September 18, another 25bp on October 31, and another 25bp on December 11 — bringing the official rate to 4.25%.

NYT:

A day after the Federal Reserve disappointed investors with a modest cut in interest rates, central banks in North America and Europe on Wednesday announced the most aggressive infusion of capital into the banking system since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

And it makes you wonder why they don’t do a one-time zillion dollar infusion of “capital” and make the whole world wealthy forever.

NEW DELHI (AFP) — A fake government office has been discovered in northern India that collected taxes, provided civic services and even handed out birth and death certificates, a report said Monday. An office was set up outside Jhansi town in Uttar Pradesh state and 20 people were employed to carry out jobs such as street sweeping. Officials believe the operation originally started as a scam to collect fees from residents in return for one municipal janitor.

In an editorial in today’s Columbus Dispatch, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and editors take credit card companies to task for raising the interest rate of certain cardholders. Sure, it’s always easy — and politically effective — to attack big business, but Levin and the Dispatch editors missed the other half of the equation: the cardholder.

ComicMix asks the question. “My favorite comic book superhero is Baruch Wane, otherwise known as Batman, in The Batman Chronicles. “The Berlin Batman,” #11 in the series by Paul Pope, details Batman’s attempts to rescue the confiscated works of persecuted Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, from Nazi Party hands.

[This Study Guide to Human Action, Chapter VIII is also available in PDF.]