Financial Markets

The US House of Representatives will hold hearings on energy markets trying to determine who is causing oil prices to rise.

As with everything else in life, competition among conceptual frameworks is very healthy, since it can quickly highlight when an economist is likely abusing his favorite technique.

Gordon is incensed that a few "analysts," including myself and Professor Stan Liebowitz of the University of Dallas, have argued that the bursting of the housing bubble has caused the chickens to come home to roost, so to speak, after thirty years of government policy pressuring banks to make tens of billions of dollars in bad loans to people with low (or nonexistent) credit ratings.

In the present article I am not taking a stand on whether price inflation will be high or low in 2008.However I will say this: If you are revising your inflation forecasts downward because of your expectation of sluggish economic growth, you might want to rethink that logic.

Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven't had capitalism.

The Producer Price Index is out and it shows a change in intermediate goods in March 2008

But the Keynesian conclusion is rather obvious: the state, through its compulsory means, has to boost the level of aggregate demand in some way to stop the economy from falling into recession.

The very existence of a centrally planned apparatus changes the real economic data, and so changes what the "correct" number of cars should have been, even if we could agree on the criteria for correctness.

The increase in monetary pumping however sets in motion a new boom-bust cycle. Also, once economic activity starts to recover on its own (as a result of the improvement in the pool of real funding) any "help" from the Fed can only slow down the process of recovery.