Forbes columnist extraordinaire Peter Ferrara was once kind enough to call my own Econoclasts “a brilliant, overlooked book.” I know another brilliant book that wasn’t overlooked when it came out last year (it was a bestseller), James Rickards’s Currency Wars, but it sure could do with a dose of renewed publicity and attention about now. [...]
The charge about the old days of the American economy—the nineteenth century, the “Gilded Age,” the era of the “robber barons”—was that it was always beset by a cycle of boom and bust. Whatever nice runs of expansion and opportunity that did come, they always seemed to be coupled with a pretty cataclysmic depression right [...]
At the famous Federal Reserve confab at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Chairman Ben Bernanke laid the groundwork for Quantitative Easing III. He couldn’t contain himself about how well the first two versions of the big Fed asset-purchase program had turned out over the last few years—unemployment is down from the peak and all that. Bernanke even [...]
Here are some words we did not hear from Sen. Barack Obama as he campaigned for the presidency back in 2008, as the Great Recession gathered: “Now, I won’t pretend the path I’m offering is quick or easy. I never have….[T]he truth is it will take more than a few years for us to solve [...]
Paul Volcker The Republicans have put some serious oomph in their presidential campaign over the last month. First Mitt Romney picked Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, a move which not only fired-up a very good portion of the electorate, but by all accounts lifted Romney’s own spirits on the trail. Now the Republicans [...]
Mitt Romney A group of top economists, among them any number of Nobel laureates, signed a letter endorsing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s economic plan. These economists indicated that as president, Romney would do six salutary things. Romney would reduce taxes, control spending, limit and improve regulation, make social security and Medicare sustainable, [...]
American Politics On the Democratic side, heading the ticket is a candidate known more for overblown, soapy rhetoric about class unfairness than for actually getting the economy moving, even with the nation stuck in torturous recession for four long years. In the vice-presidential spot is an Easterner with a dubious reputation who will [...]
If there’s one thing we can be sure of ever since this Great Recession hit four years ago, shortly after we got sated on the Beijing Olympics in late summer 2008, one verity, it is that the money supply has gone up ever since. Way up. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is known far and [...]
As George H.W. Bush turns 88 years of age, there has come a strange bout of nostalgia for days when Congress and the President worked together amicably. The notable example of the H.W. years was the atrocious “budget deal” of 1990 which made Bush break his campaign pledge of “no new taxes.” It’s probably hard [...]
It’s staple fare in opinion pages and textbooks these days that “inequality” has been on the rise in this country over the past generation. President Obama’s economic policy, for what it’s worth, has been based on this premise. The introduction to Obama’s first budget, back in 2009, went on at length: […]
President Obama’s political operatives—if Vice President Joe Biden merits even that honorific—are going to the wall this campaign season on the government bailout of the automakers from a few years back. “Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” mouthed Biden ten days ago to a campaign throng. Obama himself wants Republican presidential candidate [...]
I’ve seen the gold standard blamed for a lot of things in my day—the busts of the 19th century, the travails of the farmer back when, the Great Depression—but I’d never thought I’d see the blame for the serial economic crises we’re enduring today, in 2012, hung on the gold standard. After all, isn’t the [...]
The Pro-Growth Progressive: An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity, by Gene Sperling The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, by Benjamin Friedman In the 1970s, the Republican Party was known by another nickname than the Grand Old Party. It was also known as “the tax collector of the welfare state.” Hard as it may be for [...]
This line was supposed to be flat. Euro-dollar exchange rate. Spain is now in recession. Greece is bracing for elections, as is France, which could unleash class warfare. Austerity, low growth rates, and debt stalk the continent. The place caught such a cold that even the United Kingdom is not immune, slipping now [...]