The Center for Responsible Lending says that payday lending is a predatory business in that it lures borrowers into a "debt trap." Mike Foley says this view is all wrong: pay-day lending provides liquidity when it is most needed, and an an opportunity to establish a positive credit history.
Like the children of Lake Wobegon, writes Robert Blumen, many investors in the 1990s believed that stock market returns would always be above average. They were proven wrong. But Greenspan and many others advance a slightly different justification for the bubble: the efficient markets hypothesis, which argues that the current price, whatever it is and even when pump up by credit expansion, is the best of all possible worlds.
It happens in every bear market and in every crash. Investors get it wrong. Then regulators get it wrong. They look for scapegoats and find the wrong ones.
What's wrong with a futures market in terrorism? It is not a genuine market creation. 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 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.
You buy a stock and the price goes down. Who accepts the liability for losses? The purchaser of stock, of course, who must always bear in mind that stocks are never foreordained to go up or down. As painful as they are, investment losses are necessary to work off the excesses of a bubble, and to re-allocate capital to more promising business ventures.
Whether we look at the very sketchy circumstantial evidence, the fiduciary duty argument, or the proprietary information doctrine argument, none of these arguments can justify the prosecution of Martha Stewart. The prosecution of Martha Stewart and others before her is nothing more than the reflection of the growing anti-capitalistic mentality in our society that Mises warned us about.
Stock prices are rising, but Frank Shostak takes a look beneath the surface. It is quite likely that businesses' ability to generate real wealth has been severely impaired. This in turn precludes the possibility of a sustained economic recovery and thus the emergence of a durable up-trend in stock price indices i.e. new bull market.
While the Federal Reserve-induced stock market bubble has been flattened, despite continuous inflating by Greenspan's troops, the land price bubble continues to expand in Las Vegas.
