All Posts Tagged With: "greed"

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance

Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm’s book on the great subprime crisis gets off to a good start by dismissing as a red herring the “tired” argument attributing the boom to “greed” and focusing instead on “changes in the structure of incentives . . . that channeled greed in new and dangerous directions.” These included programs [...]

30Nov2011 | George A. Selgin | 2 comments | Continued

Dangerous Political Naifs

Being well past the age of 50 and having spent nearly all my adult life as an academic economist, I seize the privilege of doing what so many other economists of my age and rank do—namely, offer unsolicited speculations about what is right and what is wrong with modern economics. First, something that is right. [...]

26Oct2011 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 10 comments | Continued

What Happened to Greed?

Progressive commentators usually berate business people for their greed. These days they berate them for sitting on tons of cash, refusing to invest and hire — in other words, for not being greedy enough. How can we integrate these two “faults” without resorting to an explanation like “regime uncertainty,” Robert Higgs’s term for an environment [...]

23Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | Continued

Poverty Is Easy to Explain

Academics, politicians, clerics, and others always seem perplexed by the question: Why is there poverty? Answers usually range from exploitation and greed to slavery, colonialism, and other forms of immoral behavior. Poverty is seen as something to be explained with complicated analysis, conspiracy doctrines, and incantations. This vision of poverty is part of the problem [...]

21Apr2011 | Walter E. Williams | 27 comments | Continued

Gordon Gekko on Greed

When profits and losses redound to those responsible for making the decisions that produce them, market participants tend to grow more responsible and make better decisions.

28Sep2010 | Sandy Ikeda | 12 comments | Continued

Madoff is a Piker

Bernard Madoff, who stands accused of bilking sophisticated investors out of $50 billion, reportedly told two of his executives that his business was “a giant Ponzi scheme.” Perpetrators of Ponzi schemes lead clients to believe their money is invested and that their profits are the fruits of the money manager’s savvy. But in fact the [...]

1Apr2009 | John Stossel | 2 comments | Continued

Black 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 [...]

2Mar2009 | Max Borders | 62 comments | Continued

TGIF: All About Greed

It comes down to greed. That’s what the economic turmoil is all about for many people. Too many of us were greedy, and now everyone is paying the price. Luckily this belief is wrong, because if it were right we’d be up the creek. The rest of this week’s TGIF, “All About Greed,” is here.Incidentally, [...]

27Feb2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

The Fed Should Inflate to End the Financial Crisis?

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 to the Housing Mess” by John Makin, [...]

1Jul2008 | Ivan Pongracic Jr. | 1 comment | Continued

Was Dickens Really a Socialist?

I have been an avid fan of Charles Dickens’s works since before entering high school. I have also adhered to the freedom philosophy for about as long. Therefore, as the years passed and I read more and more commentators lauding Dickens as a catalyst for collectivist economics and state-centered social programs, I grew discouraged and [...]

1Dec2006 | William E. Pike | 8 comments | Continued

The Radicals’ Rancorous Rage

In a revolution for liberty, they sought power. In an age of individuality and self-reliance, they demanded obedience. In a century of personal excellence, they relished “leveling.” They called themselves Radical Patriots, as though the troops who starved and froze at Valley Forge weren’t patriotic enough. But these eighteenth-century politicians had about them little that [...]

1Jun2005 | Becky Akers | 2 comments | Continued

Capitalism: Still on Trial

It was not enough to defeat communism and cause all socialists to rethink their anti-capitalist strategy. Still the private-property market system is under sustained attack from the left. But this time the opposition has a more profitable approach. The aim is no longer to socialize everything, but to subject capitalism to a prolonged ethical assault. [...]

1Mar2005 | Norman Barry | 1 comment | Continued

Scotland: The Bitter Taste of Independence

For nearly a thousand years, the Scots have been struggling to gain independence from England—and a bloody struggle it has been, too, costing countless lives and sowing destruction in both countries. An act of union in 1707, and the suppression of revolts in 1715 and 1745, left Scotland firmly a part of the United Kingdom [...]

1May2004 | James L. Payne | 1 comment | Continued

Let Us Not Speak Falsely Now

One of the most difficult issues facing those arguing for a free society is the bias built into the way we speak. When the very words people use create a prejudice in favor of government intervention, supporters of freedom must first alert their audience to this pernicious influence, and only then can the argument about [...]

1Mar2004 | and and Gene Callahan | 1 comment | Continued

Is Greed Green?

Pierre Desrochers is research director at the Montreal Economic Institute (www.iedm.org). Devising prescriptions for “sustainable development” has made the fortune of a number of academics and consultants and provided a new raison d’être for countless bureaucracies. According to these “sustainability experts,” since the dawn of the industrial age the goals of economic growth and enhanced [...]

1Apr2003 | Pierre Desrochers | 1 comment | Continued

The Redistribution of Blame

According to John Kenneth Galbraith, the economy will at any given moment contain a certain inventory of undiscovered fraud. This inventory (he called it the “bezzle”) rises and falls with the business cycle. When an economic shakeout brings specific cases before the public eye, politicians cry for “reform!” They are unfortunately less interested in corporate [...]

1Oct2002 | and and Harold B. Jones Jr. | 0 comments | Continued

Enron Lessons

The Enron soap opera continues to unfold. and as it unfolds, lessons are being learned. Some people are learning lessons about the energy business. Some are learning lessons about the securities business. Some are learning lessons about the accounting business. But some are not content to learn such narrow lessons. They want to look at [...]

1Jun2002 | Russell Roberts | 1 comment | Continued
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