All Posts Tagged With: "easy money"
Destroying Value
In Cleveland and other American cities homes are being demolished because five years after the housing bust there is nothing better to do with them. Therein lies a lesson in Austrian business cycle theory. In a world of uncertainty, waste—the destruction of value—is inevitable. Human action, which aims to replace inferior circumstances with superior circumstances, [...]
4Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedA Simple Solution
There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong. —H. L. Mencken I have devised a simple plan for improving Americans’ health by drastically reducing everyone’s weight, thereby significantly increasing longevity and reducing medical costs. All we need to do is revalue the pound. Instead of a pound being [...]
24Aug2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 1 comment | ContinuedToo Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves
Books about the 2008 financial crisis keep coming, and New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin offers one of the better accounts of the meltdown. Using a large number of interviews, he reconstructs the words and acts of key people during the six months from the near-collapse of Bear Stearns in March to the bankruptcy [...]
24Feb2011 | Chidem Kurdas | 0 comments | ContinuedGetting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis and The Housing Boom and Bust
These two books are must-reads for anyone wanting to have a working understanding of the economic and financial crisis. They complement each other and together form a civics lesson for an informed electorate. Economists are prone to write turgid prose and employ a jargon-filled style. Not these two gems. Each author is a deservedly well-regarded [...]
22Sep2010 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. | 2 comments | ContinuedA Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression
Richard Posner’s latest book belongs to the fast-expanding cottage industry of financial crisis books. A federal judge with a grounding in economics, Posner would seem to be an ideal person to tackle this complicated subject. Alas, he provides neither fresh material nor an interesting perspective. Posner describes well-known events—the failure of investment banks Bear Stearns [...]
5Jan2010 | Chidem Kurdas | 1 comment | Continued“Easy Money” Over for College Loans
“The upheaval in financial markets did not just eliminate generous lending for home buyers; it also ended an era of easy credit for students and their families facing the soaring cost of a college degree.” (Washington Post, Monday) If this reporter had attended a FEE seminar he would understand that “easy credit” actually caused the [...]
28Dec2009 | Mike Van Winkle | 0 comments | ContinuedFederal Reserve to Leave Interest Rates Near Zero
“The Federal Reserve said Wednesday that it will shut down some of the emergency triage measures it put in place at the height of the financial crisis but will leave interest rates near zero out of continuing concern about the weak U.S. economy.” Never underestimate government’s willingness to delay the inevitable. FEE Timely Classic: “Economics [...]
17Dec2009 | Mike Van Winkle | 0 comments | ContinuedExit Strategies
As noted in the movie War Games, sometimes the only way to win a game is not to play. And sometimes the best exit strategy is not to enter in the first place.
3Dec2009 | Steven Horwitz | 2 comments | ContinuedBusiness Under German Inflation
Paper money inflation and credit expansion never fall upon a people like an act of God. They are always the outcome of a deliberate policy. The governments and the parties in power take recourse to inflation because they consider it as a blessing or at least a minor evil when compared with the effects either [...]
1Nov2003 | Ludwig von Mises | 0 comments | ContinuedJapan and the Macroeconomic Debate
“Economics is a very dangerous science” -JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES1 “Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man.” -HENRY HAZLITT2 There is no better example of today’s heated debate over macroeconomics than Japan. What policy should this nation–economically the second largest in the world–adopt to start growing again after a decade [...]
1Mar2002 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedMises on Mexico
Eduardo Turrent is the historian of the Bank of Mexico. This article is excerpted from a paper delivered at a conference of the Ludwig von Mises Cultural Institute of Mexico City, September 23–24, 1998, celebrating the publication in Spanish of Ludwig von Mises’s Mexico’s Economic Problems: Yesterday and Today, which was written in 1943 but [...]
1Mar1999 | Eduardo Turrent | 2 comments | Continued-
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