Financial Markets

Jeffrey Tucker interviews Robert Higgs. Recorded 6 October 2008.

Economic agents in general and companies in particular can only rehabilitate their finances by cutting costs (especially labor costs) and paying off loans.

The Paulson Plan is one more step in the socialization of America, but it is also a great bank robbery.

It is a sign, rather, that we have allowed our monetary, fiscal, and regulatory authorities to lure us like lambs to the slaughter to the unwarranted socialization of the most important sector of the capitalist system.

William Tucker says nuclear power is the most concentrated energy and is the cure for the nation's energy ills. And in his view there is no such thing as nuclear waste — it all is recyclable.

As long as governments and central banks continue to focus on the monetary symptoms of the "secondary depression" and continue to ignore the structural aspects of the "primary depression," they act like quacks.

The change wrought by markets goes to the very core of the issue. It makes and breaks whole institutions, sometimes overnight. And it does so in a beneficial way for the whole, without blood and without the risk of unanticipated calamity.

Hayek was arguing that whenever and wherever credit is expanded beyond market dictates by a central bank, the result will be economic distortion.

In this article, I'll explain short selling (and the "naked" variant), its benefits to the market economy, and the harm from arbitrary government restrictions on the activity.

Unless a businessman can forecast when the crash will occur, it is to his advantage to take the new money and stay abreast of the competition.