Since September 18 last year, the Fed has pushed a low interest rate policy. The federal funds rate target has been lowered from 5.25% to 2.25% currently. Despite this, liquidity conditions in credit markets have continued to deteriorate. The extra yield investors demand in return for holding corporate paper rather than risk free Treasury debt has been increasing sharply since August last year.
Marketwatch quotes Bernanke on a new benchmark: “We will not let prices fall at 10% a year.” Good thing he hasn’t been running the computer industry for the last 15 years.
From the local paper this morning, a story about the growing trend of new housing developments providing their own sewage treatment facilities on-site. Excerpt:
Economic calculation can comprehend everything that is exchanged against money.
Just published (in print and now online) is an interview I did with Atlanta Life Magazine (April issue) on this subject in the form of replies to three questions about the FairTax. Answering the same three questions, but in favor of the FairTax, is Ken Hoagland, the national communications director for FairTax.org.
The other day, I was listening to George Reisman’s wonderful speech, Memories of Mises, Rothbard, and Rand (Recorded 08-02-2005). There’s a part in it where he plays for the audience a recording of a speech he gave in the 1950s at a Roy Cohn event at which McCarthy was present.
As we embark down the path of sweeping regulatory reform of the US financial system, it useful to review the results of the previous reform. Supposedly, accounting standards were overhauled and clarified under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 to prevent companies from using accounting trickery to obscure their published financial results.
[Morality and Political Violence. By C.A.J. Coady. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Xi + 317 pages.]
Professor Coady is best known for a book on the epistemology of testimony, Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford University Press, 1992); but he has also established a well-deserved reputation as an authority on the just-war tradition. In Morality and Political Violence, he has produced a major work, characterized by an abundance of good sense and acute argument.
