A toy store owner was recently visited by Homeland Security agents. The crime? Selling a toy for which the design might have been a violation of a patent. Turned out that it was not. What does this have to do with homeland security? Let Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement explain it:

CNN reports on a Hirsch Organization observation that “if the Dow loses more than 0.5 percent of its value in the month of October before Election Day, then an incumbent president is going to lose his job. The Dow fell 0.52 percent in October.

“The Dismal Failure of Central Bank Monetary Policy” (Asia Times, by Jack Crooks, opens with a quotation from Mises: “Credit expansion is the governments’ foremost tool in their struggle against the free market.

I received the following question by email: “Why is it that Austrians are remarkably unanimous in their interpretations of economic events as compared to adherents from other schools?”I pose the following to the Austrian community.

Iowa Electronic Markets are getting more attention this year, and it is hard to imagine that they would be less accurate than the polls. Here is the pricing graph for the winner-take-all presidential match, which today shows the race tightening but Bush still winning. With poll frustration abounding, IEM is getting lots of news attention.

Today, Eamonn Butler on the Adam Smith Institute Blog says, in case of recession, “flood the markets with cheap credit until everyone has the confidence to stop selling and start buying”. He characterizes this position as the hard-won historico-economic insights of Friedman, and, strangely, claims that it stands in stark opposition to Keynesian countercyclical policy.

This is part of a transcription from an an interview of Mark Faber by Jim Puplava from FinancialSense.com.I think that Faber is right on the money in some areas, but doesn’t present a really clear picture of the Austrian view.