All Posts Tagged With: "regime uncertainty"
Regime Uncertainty, Then and Now
In a 1997 article, “Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War”, I advanced the idea of regime uncertainty in an attempt to improve our understanding of the Great Depression’s extraordinary duration and of the highly successful postwar transition to a genuinely prosperous market-oriented economy. The idea [...]
4Jan2012 | Robert Higgs | 4 comments | ContinuedUnemployment: What’s To Be Done?
In Part 1 I outlined natural unemployment, government-caused unemployment, and the attempts to measure these. We saw how ambiguous and subjective some of the concepts of unemployment are and how the government, specifically the Federal Reserve, is charged with managing it. Now we turn to current conditions and what can be done about them. There [...]
30Nov2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 6 comments | 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 | ContinuedWhat 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 | ContinuedHow the Economy Works
This book is slim. It’s also well written, which is always a surprise when the author is an academic economist. But don’t let the concision and breezy style fool you. UCLA economics professor Roger Farmer offers a big idea that he’s convinced will reduce both the frequency and size of economic booms and busts. Unfortunately [...]
22Jun2011 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 2 comments | ContinuedAnd the Slump Goes On
Official economic statistics and the underlying economic reality sometimes differ starkly. Such discrepancies may be almost inevitable when a small group of macroeconomic experts sets the official dates for peaks and troughs of aggregate economic activity. The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) recently “determined that a trough in [...]
24Feb2011 | Angel Martín Oro | 13 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 | ContinuedAmerica’s Depression within a Depression, 1937–39
The Great Depression in the United States is generally dated as beginning in 1929 and ending in 1941, give or take a year. This has led many commentators to disregard or to pass quickly over the serious depression that began in 1937 and ended—if returning to the 1937 level can be considered a depression’s end—in [...]
22Oct2010 | Robert Higgs | 8 comments | ContinuedRegulatory Failure by the Numbers
Between the current financial mess and the debate over carbon dioxide emissions controls, there is a lot of talk about regulation these days. We are told, for example, that the recession would have been prevented if proper regulations had been in place. While it is true that (by definition) the “right” regulations would have prevented [...]
25Aug2010 | and Robert L. Bradley Jr. | 5 comments | ContinuedFinancial Regulation and Regime Uncertainty
From today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription site): Dodd-Frank, with its 2,300 pages, will unleash the biggest wave of new federal financial rule-making in three generations…. In a recent note to clients, the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell needed more than 150 pages merely to summarize the bureaucratic ecosystem created by Dodd-Frank. …[T]he lawyers [...]
14Jul2010 | Sheldon Richman | 8 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 | ContinuedWhat Ended the Great Depression?
What finally ended the Great Depression? That question may be the most important in economic history. If we can answer it, we can better grasp what perpetuates economic stagnation and what cures it. The Great Depression was the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. From 1931 to 1940 unemployment was always in double digits. In [...]
24Feb2010 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 43 comments | ContinuedSaving Is Killing the Economy?
In the midst of the current recession, many of the oldest fallacies in economics are making a comeback. In a column titled “Why Saving is Killing the Economy,” senior writer Chris Isidore repeats one of the oldest: that the key to economic recovery or growth is consumption and that saving retards that process. Isidore states [...]
19Aug2009 | Steven Horwitz | 6 comments | ContinuedThe Great Depression and World War II
What about World War II? Did it end the Great Depression? More generally, is war good for the economy? I answer both in the negative and borrow here from Ludwig von Mises: “War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.” As Higgs points out, because of the array of interventions in the wartime economy, war materiel was valued incorrectly and therefore the GDP data overstate economic conditions. Moreover, conscription and arms production gave a misleading employment picture
21May2009 | Art Carden | 8 comments | ContinuedIronic Triangle
“No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” -Unidentified New York Surrogate Court judge, 1866 “President Bush has strongly hinted that he will sign any bill that emerges from Congress.” -New York Times, July 17, 2002 Did you hear the one about the congressional committee that grilled the businessman [...]
1Oct2002 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued-
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