All Posts Tagged With: "public debt"
Roots of Egypt’s Revolt
Egypt has been a pressure cooker for decades. Like others in the region, the Mubarak regime was sitting atop a simmering political crisis, simultaneously attempting to contain rising Islamist violence and snuff out pockets of political resistance. The country has been under a continuous state of emergency since the assassination of Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat, [...]
21Apr2011 | Nouh El Harmouzi | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Evil of Government Debt
As we’ve seen in the last two issues, Destutt de Tracy, writing in early nineteenth-century France, had solid insights about the market process and government spending as a form of consumption not investment. In light of that, no one will be surprised that Tracy opposed government borrowing. In this day of trillion-dollar-plus federal deficits, his [...]
25Aug2010 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedForeign Lenders: Friends Indeed to a U.S. Treasury in Need
When the U.S. government wishes to spend more money than it receives as tax revenue, it covers the shortfall by borrowing, and foreign lenders have become increasingly important sources of such borrowed funds. Reliance on foreign lenders is as old as the republic. Indeed, loans from the French and the Dutch proved critical in keeping [...]
29Jun2010 | Robert Higgs | 2 comments | ContinuedGreece: The Canary in the U.S. Coal Mine?
With everything that was going on in the U.S. economy this past winter, the beginnings of the crisis facing the Greek economy were certainly easy to miss. As that crisis has now come to full flower, American observers overlook it at their peril: Greece’s problems, and those of other European countries, might well represent a [...]
29Jun2010 | Steven Horwitz | 13 comments | ContinuedRutherford B. Hayes and the Financing of American Prosperity
Rutherford B. Hayes, America’s nineteenth president (1877–1881), is generally dismissed as a minor, even below-average president. Matthew Josephson, the journalist-chronicler of the late 1800s, insisted that Hayes had “no capacity for . . . large-minded leadership.” Other historians have written him off as just another cipher among a string of forgettable chief executives of the [...]
23Oct2009 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 4 comments | ContinuedHamilton’s Blessing by John Steele Gordon
Walker and Company • 1997 • 214 pages • $21.00 Richard Timberlake, a Freeman contributing editor, is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Georgia, Athens. Hamilton’s Blessing, by historian John Steele Gordon, begins by declaring that “The United States, was born in debt.” And the last sentence in Gordon’s conclusion states: “So while [...]
1Feb1998 | Richard H. Timberlake | 0 comments | ContinuedPrinciple & Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt
Mr. French is a vice president in commercial real estate lending for a bank in Las Vegas, Nevada. In his History of Economics classes, Murray Rothbard told us that it was important not just to study what policies and theories held sway during the past, but to examine why certain economists or politicians advocated the [...]
1Oct1996 | Douglas E. French | 0 comments | Continued-
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