Alex Padilla successfully defended his PhD thesis on Thursday August 28 at Universite of Aix-Marseille III. Alex’s thesis was entitled: “Insider Trading, Agency Theory, and Corporate Governance.” Alex’s work on Insider Trading started during a year in-residence at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and continued during another year in-residence as a visiting scholar at the James M.
Consumer Credit Getting Worse (Reuters): “Fitch Ratings warned on Friday that U.S. consumer credit quality will worsen in the fourth quarter and into early 2004 from the lingering effects of a weak job market and flood of personal bankruptcy filings. There have been nascent signs that the job market is turning around and the rest of the economy is picking up steam, but some Americans are still struggling to make debt payments like their credit card bills, the bond rating service said.
Labor “Union” Day brings out the worst in politicians, of course, but Bush may just mean what he is reported by Reuters to have said:
We would do well to be suspicious of statistics on relative productivity, as compiled by that organ of One World Socialism, the ILO — with all its shibboleths about ‘rights’ to worker’s representation and ‘decent’ work, ‘fair’ wages, ‘gender gaps’ and all the rest of the leftist paraphernalia on display there.
Gene Epstein, writing in Barron’s ($), continues his assault on the Fed.
Writing about airport troubles invites correpondents to tell their own stories:
Last August 13th, while going through security at Newark airport, everyone was required to remove their shoes and put them through the scanner. Given that I knew - from previous experience - my own shoes had metal in them, I was prepared to do that anyway.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the economics of Ludwig von Mises is his insistence on the a priori approach. For Mises, economic “laws” must be logically deduced from antecedent axioms, so that—assuming the initial assumptions are true—the conclusions reached are just as valid as any result in Euclidean geometry.
A growing recognition of the superiority of markets over planning has created an unviable hybrid: the planned market, one created not by property owners but rather by the state and for the state. Planned markets bear a close enough resemblance to the real thing to fool even astute observers who are otherwise friends of genuine market forces. And yet the designed “market” is responsible for a whole range of recent economic failures, such as electricity shortages and blackouts, and will cause more if the idea is taken to areas like predicting terrorism.
