Booms and Busts

When Paul Volcker was Fed chairman forty years ago, he did what was necessary to bring down inflation. Unfortunately, the current Fed leadership at best is engaging in Volcker Lite.

As prices rise, many people—including economists, who should know better—claim that price increases are inflation. They are not.

Forget the talk from Biden and economists like Paul Krugman. Double-digit inflation is here, and it will be with us for a while.

Mortgage companies and realtors are today's canaries. They're in deep trouble, and so are the rest of us. 

The great credit expansion Alan Greenspan began thirty years ago has finally run its course. The Fed no longer can expand credit to fight the oncoming recession.

"If recovery is to be maintained and future progress assured, there must be a more or less complete reversal of contemporary tendencies of governmental regulation of enterprise."

Most economists see GDP as a snapshot of the performance of the economy. However, it is better understood as a misleading statistic which fails to accurately describe what really is happening economically.

The relative lack of inflation in Japan doesn't mean real wages haven't fallen.

Jeff and Bob discuss the effect of rising interest rates on Uncle Sam's ability to service debt—and promote the increasingly less radical idea that a default on Treasury debt is both inevitable and good.

The Federal Reserve was supposed to prevent recessions that people blamed on the lack of central banking. Not surprisingly, the post-Fed recessions have been worse.