‘Let the Dollar Drop’
The Economist: “Some think the dollar has fallen too far. On the contrary, it has not fallen by enough.” (Thanks to R.F.)
The Mars Con
What are the costs of a mission to Mars? The $11 billion direct expenses are only the beginning, write Erich Mattei. The burdens also include taxation and inflation, the crowding out caused by state-sponsored research and development, the misallocation of physical and labor resources, the draining away of talent from the private sector, pollution, and many other hidden costs.
The Last (Bond) Vigilante
Bond guru Bill Gross writes about the shift of the US economy from producing things to consuming things on credit that other people finance, and why this is unsustainable in the long run. The latter he calls a “finance-based economy”. The characteristic of such an economy is that it is dependent on continuous credit expansion to keep the supply of credit plentiful and cheap:
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Here is a great story (from The Economist) about entrepreneurial risk, Steve Jobs, the rivalry between Jobs and Eisner, and Jobs’ decision to divorce Pixar from Disney. An excerpt:
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The Word Made Web
A journalist writing a book on the ongoing development of the web recently asked me for some Big Thoughts on the relationship between new technology and ideas. Rather than attempt that, here are some Small Thoughts that I hope amount to at least the sum of their parts. In one sense, the web is a lot like the world: filled with good and evil, dumb and smart, unified in some ways and radically diverse in other ways, and way too large to characterize in anything like a sweeping statement. It has also taught us much about the world we did not know.
The Bogeyman of Lost Jobs
An unfortunate consequence of learning Bastiat’s “Broken Window Fallacy,” writes Jude Blanchette, is the accompanying frustration of seeing this age old economic fallacy reappear ad nauseam. One of the latest, and indeed most vocal rock throwers, is the United States manufacturing sector.
Dollars to Gold
Japanese Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki suggested last week that Japan could diversify part of its huge foreign exchange reserves from dollars into gold. But doing so rapidly would hurt the country’s export-based economy (that is, it would stop the subsidy exporters currently enjoy).
Outsourcing and the Weak Dollar
Could the weak dollar have the effect of reducing the incentive to outsource capital and labor? If so, would that create a political incentive to maintain it through monetary policy? Declan McCullagh writes (on ZDNet):
