Economics

The motivating factor?  this article in Politico: President Barack Obama plans to announce in next year's State of the Union address that he wants to focus extensively on cutting the federal deficit in 2010 – and will downplay…

Columbia University Professor and former Federal Reserve official Frederic Mishkin wrote a much-discussed Op-Ed in the Financial Times yesterday. In it, he asks Are potential asset-price bubbles always dangerous? He answers this…

That’s all you need to know. Source FOMC statement – Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

I have said on a number of occasions that a sovereign nation that issues debt in its own fiat currency cannot default involuntarily.  The case most people point to as a counterfactual is Russia in 1998.  I mentioned Russia in a…

The following is a re-print of the latest monthly newsletter from Niels Jensen of Absolute Return Partners, published with the express permission of the author. Visit www.arpllp.com to learn more about Absolute Return Partners. You can…

Several notable economists prognosticated on what Japan should do to get out of their malaise in the 1990s but none of them understood the problem or the options available to the sovereign government. They all gave poor advice. The way…

When I read Ed’s recent piece “Japan: stimulus without reform leads to a policy cul de sac,” I couldn’t help but think he is wrong about Japan. Supporting aggregate demand The problem is taxes. In Japan, taxes are too high relative to the…

If one wants to see what happens when you use stimulus to help keep zombie companies alive and to resist reform efforts, look no further than Japan.  For twenty years now, Japan has been dealing with the consequences of a burst asset…

This is a post I wrote in response to an ongoing debate about financial crises, credit revulsion and deficit spending over at Naked Capitallism. See the four links in the first paragraph for the precursor articles. DoctoRx, Rob Parenteau…

Steve Horwitz had an interesting read last week on Friedrich von Hayek, the Nobel Prize winning Austrian School economist. Von Hayek is best known for his 1944 Libertarian call to arms “Road to Serfdom” and is generally considered one of…