All Posts Tagged With: "recession"
Quantitative Easing Forever?
Despite assertions that it has ended its policy of quantitative easing (QE), the Fed is unlikely to be able to do so until it also ends its zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP). This deadly policy duo has had terrible consequences for the American economy and every country using U.S. dollars. It is as though the Fed were [...]
26Oct2011 | Christopher Lingle | 1 comment | ContinuedProgressive Intolerance
Television pundits increasingly express an attitude that is at once arrogant and ignorant: The people who oppose Keynesian economics—specifically an increase in government deficit spending to create jobs and jumpstart the economy—are the same kind of people who also believe that the earth is only several thousand years old (rather than 4.5 billion), that evolution [...]
26Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 7 comments | ContinuedMore Government Action Needed for Job Recovery?
Would it come as a shock to hear one of the best-known apologists for government intervention in the economy admitting that it hasn’t worked (so far)? This is exactly what Nobel Prize-winning economist and uber-Keynesian Paul Krugman does in a New York Times column, stating, “[W]e are not now and have never been on the [...]
26Oct2011 | Tyler Watts | 1 comment | ContinuedRichman Debates Keynesian on The Voice of Russia Radio
I debated a Keynesian economist about the economy and unemployment on The Voice of Russia Radio last week. Listen here (scroll down).
7Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedThe Infrastructure Delusion
Goods, people, and information will not flow freely across a nation, regardless of the quality and extent of its infrastructure, if taxes and regulations block their flow.
15Aug2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 41 comments | ContinuedPrivate Investment and Public “Investment”
Politicians are fond of telling the public that we must “invest” in this program or that—be it education; health care; make-work infrastructure projects like the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”; $50 million for an indoor rainforest in Iowa; $3.4 million for a tunnel to allow turtles to cross under a highway in Florida; $1.8 million for swine [...]
22Jun2011 | Adam B. Summers | 1 comment | ContinuedWho Told Whom So?
From Mario Rizzo at ThinkMarkets: In recent months – or has it been years? – Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong have been saying, in effect, “We told you so – the stimulus was not enough. Look at the sluggish economy and high unemployment rate.” They are arguing that the problem with the fiscal stimulus is [...]
15Jun2011 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedWar Would End the Recession?
In his September 28 New York Times blog post, Paul Krugman announced that “economics is not a morality play.” That turn of phrase is his way of defending the idea that in unusual times, such as the sort of deep recession we are in, we can get strange relationships between economic cause and effect. The result [...]
22Dec2010 | Steven Horwitz | 41 comments | ContinuedPresidential Hubris
If we were going to spend $700 billion, it seems it would be wiser having that $700 billion going to folks who would spend that money right away. In October Barack Obama said this in defense of his opposition to extending the 2001 and 2003 tax-rate reductions for people making more than $200,000 a year. [...]
22Dec2010 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Broken-Window Fallacy Writ Large and Dangerous
Veteran Washington Post political columnist David Broder yesterday: What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy. Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II. Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With [...]
1Nov2010 | Sheldon Richman | 9 comments | ContinuedThe House That Uncle Sam Built
The Great Recession (or the Great Hangover) that began in 2008 did not have to happen. Its causes and consequences are not mysterious. Indeed, this particular and very painful episode affirms what the best nonpartisan economists have tried to tell our politicians and policy-makers for decades, namely, that the more they try to inflate and [...]
8Oct2010 | and Peter J. Boettke | 1 comment | ContinuedNot All Job Destruction Is Creative
When government policy generates booms and busts, it creates unsustainable jobs that eventually will be destroyed.
26Aug2010 | Steven Horwitz | 10 comments | ContinuedCause, Effect, and the Current Depression
All too often people confuse cause and effect.
11Aug2010 | William L. Anderson | 10 comments | ContinuedWhat’s Missing from this Picture?
Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson wrote last week: [T]he [economic] crisis has also battered the logic of all major theories: Keynesianism, monetarism and “rational expectations.” Economics has become the shaky science; its intellectual chaos provides context for today’s policy disputes at home and abroad. Nowhere does he mention Austrian economics. Had he been familiar [...]
6Jul2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedEconomy Loses Jobs
The government discharged the temporary census workers, and the economy lost a net 125,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate dropped to 9.5 percent — because discouraged people left the work force. The Keynesian strategy for recovery is a rousing success.
2Jul2010 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedProducing Jobs: Thoughts on Obama’s Plan for Small Businesses
The ears of small business America must have perked up when President Obama spoke about that critically important sector in his State of the Union address. Mine certainly did. Here’s when it really got interesting: “I’m . . . proposing a new small business tax credit—one that will go to over one million small businesses [...]
20May2010 | Bruce Yandle | 2 comments | ContinuedGovernment Must Stimulate to Avoid a 1937-Style Recession?
It is rather unfortunate that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Economics Prize Committee chose to award the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics to Paul Krugman. It is not that Krugman did not deserve the prize—his contributions to international trade theory were indeed substantive and valuable. The problem is that by 2008 Krugman had long [...]
24Mar2010 | Ivan Pongracic Jr. | 6 comments | Continued-
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