Alan Greenspan is Asia’s central banker, argues William Pesek in the International Herald Tribune. 

“A big part of the decline in wholesale prices came from retreating energy prices, which had been stoked in previous months by war tensions,” reports the Kansas City Star.  With the specter of falling energy prices hovering over the economy, thank goodness that Asia’s central banker is on the job.

Alabama’s Superintendent of Education Ed Richardson threatened Friday to close Alabama’s 1,400 public schools on Oct. 1 if voters reject Gov. Bob Riley’s record-high tax plan and legislators fail to adopt an education budget, reports today’s Birmingham News.

Writes Alberto Mingardi, former summer fellow at the Mises Institute: “This was published yesterday by the Wall Street Journal Europe. I thought you may be interested in reading it.”

***
Italy’s Tyranny of Labor Protection
Alberto Mingardi

Don’t miss Jörg Guido Hülsmann’s piece today: “Deflation: The Biggest Myths.” An audio version of a talk he gave last week on deflation

Thanks to David Nichols at 21st Century Alert for citing Frank Shostak’s piece in today’s “Morning Briefing”: “In this essay, the author makes a detailed argument why the pumping of the money supply can cause a ‘reshuffling’ of assets in the short term, but that ultimately this is not a solution if the pool of real savings and real wealth in the economy is not expanding.

Mises Institute summer fellow Daniel McCathy on the proposed spam tax.

“Christopher Caldwell doesn’t like spam. That’s ok – who does? Caldwell, however, thinks that the solution to unsolicited commercial email is to have ‘lawmakers’ – the federal government – do something about it. There’s a problem here, but what’s worse is that Caldwell gives the impression that his real objective here isn’t to eliminate nuisance email, it’s to set a precedent for taxing the internet.”

Jeffrey Frankel of Harvard (Financial Times): “imposing the dollar on Iraq could also feed widespread fears of US imperialism. The politics would get even trickier if, as in Argentina, the arrangement hit a crisis - for example, as a consequence of an increase in US interest rates.... My proposal for Iraq, therefore, is to...define the value of the dinar as one-third of a dollar plus one-third of a euro, plus one-hundredth of a barrel of oil.” 

We continue to hear wonderful comments on Roger Garrison’s Hayek Lecture at the London School of Economics. (Read his published paper.)  LSE head Tony Giddens said: ”The lecture was excellent and the dinner discussion sophisticated.” Also, Garrison met at 10 Downing Street with economic advisers to the PM. More information to come. 

“At the risk of sounding like Chicken Little, I am going to describe the economic situation in plain English. The United States is flirting with a low-grade depression, one that may last for years unless the government takes decisive action to overcome it,” says William “Easy-Money Bill” Greider in The Nation.