Now that France’s incumbent President Sarkozy has been defeated at the polls by socialist candidate M. Hollande, Americans should have gotten a wake-up call. Angela Merkel now seems to be the only voice of European reason in the rising popular tide against budgetary austerity and a return to the by now old-fashioned idea that...
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[*UPDATE: Fed Joked About Housing Crash in 2006! Here is a good interview from PBS] “Tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right.” “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.” —John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government “The historian is . . . one step nearer to direct power over public opinion than is the theorist.” —Friedrich A. von...
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Eastern bloc economists Carmen Reinhart, she of the University of Maryland, and Kenneth Rogoff, he of Harvard, have gotten rave reviews for This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, published in 2009 by Princeton University Press. I started reading it today, now that the book is out in paperback. It didn’t take...
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[Cross-posted in the March 22 issue of The Lighthouse, the Independent Institute’s weekly email newsletter. Sign up for your free subscription here.] We are delighted to announce the publication of the Spring 2011 issue of the Independent Institute’s peer-reviewed journal, The Independent Review, edited by Senior Fellow Robert Higgs. This issue’s articles and book...
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In the run-up to President Obama’s “State of the Union” address this evening, the nation’s monetary and fiscal policymakers seem, as often is true, to be working at cross-purposes. According to reports published in The Wall Street Journal yesterday (January 24, 2011), Chairman Ben Bernanke at long last has concluded that the Fed should...
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According to the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Rapoport (“Bailed-Out Banks Slip toward Failure”, 12/27/2010, p. C1), 98 U.S. financial institutions, which collectively were granted $4.2 billion in handouts under Washington’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), are in danger of going belly-up. The commercial banks imminently in peril, such as the Legacy Bank of Milwaukee...
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The most recent quote reported in the Wall Street Journal (September 15, 2010) values gold at $1,268.50 per ounce, a historic high, albeit unadjusted for inflation. Will rosy expectations never fail to persist? It is certainly true that the expansionary policies currently being pursued by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke auger much higher future rates...
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Economists and pundits, who contend that the Federal Reserve System has little room to maneuver in using monetary policy to jump-start our anemic economy, often have claimed that America is mired in a Keynesian liquidity trap, a situation in which the demand for money is unresponsive to changes in market interest rates. After all,...
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Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs is interviewed on “Government’s Intrusions Threaten Economy.” Interviewed by Steve Stanek of the Heartland Institute, Dr. Higgs explains that the government’s growing intrusions into the economy—bank bailouts, economic stimulus, interest rate manipulations and credit expansion by the Federal Reserve, increased business regulations—could eventually lead to soaring price inflation...
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After Ron Paul raised questions about possible past Federal Reserve misdeeds including allegations of involvement in Watergate payoffs, Ben Bernanke answered smugly: “These specific allegations you’ve made, I think are absolutely bizarre.” The crowd reflexively laughed at Dr. No’s perceived looniness and pundits have already depicted his concerns as “wild” and “odd.” Well, it...
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