Review: Niall Ferguson’s Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe
Niall Ferguson’s new book Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe is timely. But Ferguson may just be telling the reader what he wants to hear.
Niall Ferguson’s new book Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe is timely. But Ferguson may just be telling the reader what he wants to hear.
The Fed says rate hikes are at least two years away. A lot can happen in two years, and since when is forecasting a couple rate bumps two years from now considered hawkish to the point of making the dollar pop and gold flop?
Fannie and Freddie were long quasi-government corporations that typified the corrupt union between the feds and corporate America. But now it looks like both companies are just full-on government corporations.
Although it conjures up scary imagery, shadow banking is simply a term for banking operations that occur through financial intermediaries that are not traditional commercial banks.
It's already clear that after an initial sugar high caused by stimulus funds, there's now hardly any "bang for the buck" from stimulus funds. In fact, governments are spending millions for each job "created" by stimulus.
Local governments now control child adoption in America. A recent Supreme Court ruling highlights just how political and capricious local officials can be in exercising this power.
The Sanders proposal comes with all of the hidden costs and other unwanted surprises that one would expect from a politician who has supported totalitarian governance for all of his political life.
Interventionism does not work because it misallocates resources in the economy. More importantly, it disturbs, distorts, and destroys the corrective process whereby market actors reallocate resources back into a sustainable framework.
Countless Americans have been repeatedly told to “follow the science,” supposedly to prove they are not obstinately closed-minded. But the main purpose of it all was just to open people’s minds to what government bureaucrats wanted.
One big problem a government police force must always face is: What laws really to enforce? Police departments are theoretically faced with the absolute injunction, “enforce all laws,” but in practice scarcity means only some laws are enforced. Which ones?