There is growing outrage over the killing of black seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, a legal and unarmed guest of the Florida gated community whose (perhaps unofficial) neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, shot Martin dead last month in an incident that raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions about racial tensions and violence in modern America. A common...
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I am not a prophet, nor do I play one on TV. Nevertheless, I will hazard some conjectures here about certain likely legacies of the current crisis. I focus on fiscal and monetary matters. In a future post, I will deal with regulatory and ideological matters. I will try to avoid mere guesses or hunches...
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In his speech after the Iowa caucuses, Newt Gingrich warned that “an Iranian nuclear weapon is one of the most frightening things we have to confront.” He was criticizing the non-interventionist views of Ron Paul, but beyond the presidential campaign, we seem to have this bundle of assumptions overtaking the media and most political...
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Ronald Reagan said “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.” Nowhere does this appear more true than with the state of the global economy today. My fellow blogger Robert Higgs has repeatedly emphasized the government creation of regime uncertainty that keeps unemployment high and investment low, because businesses are...
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In an op-ed that ran last week in the Wall Street Journal, Nobel laureate writer and Gala for Liberty honoree Mario Vargas Llosa defended his passion for individual liberty and lamented those critics—on the left and the right—who praise his novels but distance themselves from the pro-freedom ideals they represent. One reason for the disconnect, he argues, can be...
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According to an ABC News report last week, At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today [October 26], President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America. “The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we...
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As did many, former Mayor Willie Brown wrote a tribute of Steve Jobs in his San Francisco Chronicle column this week. Except, in inimitable Willie Brown fashion, his was rather more a tribute to himself—an accolade to Brown’s magnanimous use of his discretionary power to make a San Francisco Apple store possible. It seems...
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Yale economist William Nordhaus, with the typically enlightened attitude of a Yale professor, offers his thoughts on monetary reform: Mr. Nordhaus dismissed notions of scrapping the central bank, as well as criticism of its chairman, Ben Bernanke, as “partisan” and “ignorant.” “Return to the gold standard? Give me a break. We’re not in Kansas....
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Six years ago, I wrote about the extension about to be made to keep in force the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA), first enacted in 2002 in the wake of the events of 9/11 and the panic those events created. As usual, opportunists of all stripes rushed to take advantage of the crisis, and among them were...
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Thomas Mayer is the chief economist of Deutsche Bank Group and head of Deutsche Bank Research. He has an impressive background as a highly placed analyst in major private and public financial institutions. Which is to say, when he speaks, people are much more likely to pay attention and to give weight to what he says than...
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