All Posts Tagged With: "financial crisis"
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
Reading The Return of Depression Economics, I have to admit I was surprised. Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics and New York Times columnist, isn’t as feisty and partisan in the book as he is in his column. Moreover, he presents some useful information about the many economic collapses that have occurred in [...]
18Nov2009 | William L. Anderson | 0 comments | ContinuedMeltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse
Thomas Woods’s Meltdown is a marvel of writing and publishing. Having arrived on shelves in February, it offers a complete analysis of the causes of the current recession as well as a critical assessment of the mistakes policymakers have already made, and will likely continue to make, in response to the economic decline.
The marvel is [...]
Free-Marketeers Should Welcome Regulation?
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Paul Singer, chairman of the Manhattan Institute, suggests that “there is an urgent need for a new global regulatory initiative” to address the causes of the worldwide financial collapse and that even those who appreciate the qualities of free markets should welcome the new and different regulations he proposes [...]
23Sep2009 | Peter Lewin | 0 comments | ContinuedThe “Watchful Eye” Fallacy
Because they are made of the same human stuff, it is unreasonable to expect government officials to correct errors being made in the marketplace. A look at the market failures Obama alluded to in his speech bears this out. Take the speculative bubble in housing. Did senators see the danger before the rest of us and pass laws to limit the purchase of real estate? Of course not. They participated in the housing boom along with everyone else.
21May2009 | James L. Payne | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
The stocks of banks, investment banks, and associated financial institutions declined severely in 2007-08 when their many bad loans, first in subprime mortgages and then in other securities, surfaced. Scholars will be pondering this event for years to come, as they have with the Great Depression.
In this instant and brief history, Charles Morris, lawyer, banker, [...]
Ought Implies Can
Too often ethical pronouncements have an air of hubris about them, as the pronouncer simply assumes we can do what he says we ought to do. By contrast, economics demands some humility. We always have to ask whether it’s humanly possible to do what the ethicists say we ought. To say we ought to do something we cannot do, in the sense that it won’t achieve our end, is to engage in a pointless exercise. If we cannot do it, to say that we ought to is to command the impossible.
24Apr2009 | Steven Horwitz | 4 comments | ContinuedBlack Swans, Butterflies, and the Economy
One side blames the market. The other blames government. We get two causal stories going in opposite directions and a lot of animus. But both perhaps are missing something important in this titanic debate about our current financial crisis. It’s time we exposed a complicated truth about the economy of the 21st century.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb [...]
Did Deregulated Derivatives Cause the Financial Crisis?
For a few months in 2008 I naively thought that the disastrous financial “rescue” actions led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson would at least be counterbalanced by widespread recognition that our economic turmoil had been government’s handiwork.
How wrong I was. By the time of this writing, the mainstream press had delivered the “consensus” judgment that [...]
Bootleggers, Baptists, and Bailed-Out Bankers
For more than a year now, people worldwide have experienced an extraordinary chain of economic events. Led by crushing increases in U.S. mortgage-related bankruptcies, the world financial collapse that followed has been termed the subprime crisis, the financial meltdown, the Wall Street bailout, the beginning of another Great Depression, and even the end of capitalism [...]
2Mar2009 | Bruce Yandle | 3 comments | ContinuedThe Free Market Is Failing? It Just Aint So!
There is no doubt the U.S. economy has hit a rough patch over the last several months. As is often the case when economic problems make headlines, pundits rush to declare that capitalism is “in trouble,” or “is ailing” or even “has failed.” This reaction to economic bad news is as old as capitalism itself. [...]
1Dec2008 | Steven Horwitz | 5 comments | ContinuedThe Recurring Crisis
Recently the governor of the Bank of England announced that the “nice” times had come to an end. (In the Bank’s lexicon, NICE = “Non-Inflationary Constant Expansion”). This news will not come as any shock to the many Americans who have had their homes repossessed recently, but it does appear to have startled many of [...]
1Jul2008 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Fed Should Inflate to End the Financial Crisis? It Just Ain’t So!
Ivan Pongracic, Jr. teaches economics at Hillsdale College.
The current housing and financial crisis has many people blaming “greed and market forces” for unleashing a panoply of evils on the unsuspecting middle class. This has led to many bad proposals to solve the crisis, such as the April 14 Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Inflation Solution [...]
The Current Economic Crisis and the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle
Richard Ebeling is completing his tenure as the president of FEE. This fall he will teach economics at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
The current financial crisis emerged out of an economic boom that began in 2003 and saw rising stock values, increasing home prices, and high levels of employment and production. The upturn followed a [...]
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
