The culmination of last night’s Oscars broadcast with a Live! feed from the White House with Mrs. Obama (hangin’ with her military BFs) marks the official recognition of the Presidency as theater: like the old Western sets, no substance required. From the very beginning, President Obama was elected based on his strong delivery of...
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Among the celebrants at the inaugural balls will be top contributors to the President’s reelection campaign, but their real celebration will be April 15, when they continue to be the beneficiaries of a “tax loophole” Obama pledged to close in 2008—but that remains gaping wide open despite his rhetoric about now making “the rich”...
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Since the fall of 2008, the Federal Reserve System has pumped an almost incomprehensibly large amount of reserves into the commercial banking system—about $1.4 trillion. In normal circumstances, this action would have given rise to hyperinflation. Of course, not only has no hyperinflation occurred, but scarcely any inflation at all has occurred, and policy...
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When the September unemployment figures were announced a month before the presidential election as having miraculously declined to below 8% for the first time since the current administration started, more than a few speculated that there may have been some book-cooking in the back room. In response, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, said she was...
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Following on my recent post citing corporate CEOs’ complaint that continuing “Regime Uncertainty” forestalls their companies’ investing and hiring, corporate CFOs are today following suit, as reported by DeLoitte’s “CFO Signals“: CFOs’ expectations for sales and earnings growth both dropped precipitously this quarter, and their expectations for capital investment and hiring followed suit. The...
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As a young woman, I took over a business that was bankrupt: its liabilities exceeded its assets by a considerable amount, and the wolf was well and truly at the door. Lots of people thought I was foolish not to “erase” its debts through filing bankruptcy and be given a “clean slate” by the...
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Yesterday on The Beacon I noted that the Federal Reserve’s new “quantitative easing” measure, QE3, is an example of crony capitalism: the use of public policy to increase the profitability of specific firms and industries. Today I want to compare QE3 with another example of crony capitalism to reinforce the point. General Motors provides...
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I’ve been teaching economics for decades, and until 2008 I taught my students that the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) engages in monetary policy through open market operations by buying and selling government securities. (They have other policy tools too.) They dealt in government securities partly because their operations would alter the money supply without...
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Electoral politics is a moral and intellectual wasteland. There is no room for anyone of principle, whatever that principle might be. As a libertarian, I see little difference between Obama and Romney. They both favor a perpetual war on terror, an occupation of Afghanistan, military aid to Israel, indefinite detention of terror suspects, military...
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When the euro was created in 1999 the new currency promised to facilitate trade within the euro zone, to further unify Europe, and to challenge the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The common currency does facilitate trade, but the differing goals of the member countries seem to be creating more divisiveness than unity...
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