All Posts Tagged With: "housing market"

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 | Continued

Can Government Manage the Economy?

A doctor says he can cure illness by waving birch wands over the patient. We are skeptical, but being open-minded we agree to give him a chance with ailing Uncle George. He waves a red wand and chants something. The patient shows no improvement. “Let me try a green one,” he says. We’re still tolerant. [...]

21Apr2011 | James L. Payne | 2 comments | Continued

The Canard of “Underutilized Resources”

Last November the Federal Open Market Committee announced plans to purchase, by printing money, $600 billion of long-term government bonds over the next 6 months. This “quantitative easing,” Fed Chairman Bernanke assures us, is necessary to aid an economy that is suffering from “a very high level of underutilization of resources.” In other words, there’s [...]

24Feb2011 | Tyler Watts | 1 comment | Continued

When Will They Ever Learn?

So here’s our lesson for today: If the government temporarily offers an extraordinary tax credit for buying a house, some people who were thinking of buying a home in the future will do so sooner and the market will be goosed. When the tax credit ends, sales will fall back into the doldrums. Imagine that.

2Jul2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

That's Politics for You

I found this interesting tidbit in Wikipedia’s entry on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act: Democrats agreed to support the bill after Republicans agreed to strengthen provisions of the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act… G-L-B,  the last significant bank deregulation that occurred in the U.S., repealed the part of the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall Act that forbade a single institution [...]

12Mar2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

FEE at Western New England College

This morning FEE and the economics department at Western New England College in Springfield, Mass., held our sixth annual symposium.  This year’s program comprised two debates on “The Financial Crisis.” Session I: How Did We Get into This Mess? featured Prof. Steven Horwitz of St. Lawrence University, representing FEE, and Prof. Fred Lee of the [...]

5Mar2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Economic Facts and Fallacies

You don’t have to read far to find the focus of Thomas Sowell’s latest book, Economic Facts and Fallacies. It begins by quoting John Adams—“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence”—then immediately argues for the [...]

22Jan2009 | Gary M. Galles | 5 comments | Continued

Deflation: The Bogeyman of Bankers and Confused Economists

Excellent article on this currently popular topic from the FEE vault: The Dreaded D Word by Christopher Mayer

15Dec2008 | Mason Drake | 0 comments | Continued

Bailing Out Statism

The key to understanding the saga of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the newly nationalized twin government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that dominate home financing—is this: They were created—intentionally—to distort the housing and mortgage markets. That is, government planners were not content to let voluntary exchange and spontaneous market forces configure those industries unmolested. So—holding the taxpayers hostage—they [...]

1Dec2008 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

Prosperity Is Hazardous to Our Health and Wealth?

The left long ago abandoned the argument that socialism would produce greater prosperity than capitalism (although Paul Samuelson still clung to this belief as late as 1988) and now devotes most of its energy to fabricating myriad “problems” with capitalist prosperity. A particularly shallow example of this argument was recently on display in a February [...]

1Jun2001 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 1 comment | Continued

How Fair Is Fair Housing?

Owning property used to mean that you had the right to do with it as you pleased. You could sell it, rent it, or give it away. You could also refuse to do so. Some people might be disappointed by your decision, but all they could do was to search elsewhere for what they wanted. [...]

1Nov1997 | George C. Leef | 2 comments | Continued

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