The roots of the crisis from a United States perspective: To understand today’s financial crisis, you must understand the long history of government interference and subsidies for housing and housing debt. Since the New Deal, the federal government has passed law after law attempting to shape U.S. housing markets. The […]
Read MorePost Tagged with: "Finance"
Banks, economic interventionism and the cause of the credit crisis
(This post is a precis of Huerta de Soto’s Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles pp650-653, presenting an argument which was famously expounded by von Mises in Socialism. Among the young idealists who were attracted to socialism after the Great War, who came through these arguments expressed in full to […]
Read MoreDan Hannan MEP sets about the Prime Minister in the European Parliament
China’s Wen worried over US assets
Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, has voiced concern over the outlook of US government bonds, calling on Washington to ease worries about US assets. Speaking at his annual news conference on Friday, Wen expressed concern that massive US deficit spending and near-zero interest rates could erode the value of China’s […]
Read MoreMeasures of the money supply
A dynamic chart showing the various measures of the money supply is available at mises.org: The True Money Supply (TMS) was formulated by Murray Rothbard and represents the amount of money in the economy that is available for immediate use in exchange. It has been referred to in the past […]
Read MoreAnthony Evans: Quantitative easing is an exotic label for a discredited policy
Leading British Austrian-school economist Anthony Evans writes on QE: Economists tend to define QE as when the central bank conducts open-market operations to buy government and corporate securities using newly created money. Many economics textbooks fail to mention QE, suggesting that this is a new and extreme form of monetary […]
Read MoreFT.com / UK – UK tax-take to reveal depth of crisis
On the tax-take and on the risk to the nation’s finances, via FT.com / UK – UK tax-take to reveal depth of crisis: A dramatic deterioration in the public finances is expected to be revealed on Thursday morning as official figures show extremely weak tax revenues in the crucial month of […]
Read MoreBritain’s bankers plumb new depths – Times Online
Via Britain’s bankers plumb new depths – Times Online : Jon Moulton, the private equity chief, warned a City lunch this week that he feared serious civil unrest. There was, he said, a 25 per cent chance of one of the 15 member countries of the eurozone pulling out of the currency […]
Read MoreLloyds Banking Group rocked by shock losses in HBOS – Times Online
Taxpayers could have to spend billions bailing out the banks again after massive and unexpected losses were disclosed by Britain’s new superbank. Shares in Lloyds Banking Group fell 32 per cent to 61.4p yesterday after it reported losses of £10 billion in HBOS, making it worth far less than thought […]
Read MoreWhy the Downturn? – T E Woods, Jr
It’s not exactly clear how the Federal Reserve’s policy of pushing interest rates well below where the free market would have set them, thereby inflating the biggest asset bubble in the history of the world, could be the fault of the free market, or attributable to “laissez faire.” But since […]
Read More
