Walter Williams explains the financial crisis:The blame for our current financial mess rests with government, with the major player being the Federal Reserve Board keeping interest rates artificially low and the congressional and White House market interference in the name of more home ownership. In the clamor for more regulation over our financial institutions, has anybody bothered to ask whether people in government know what they're doing?
Tags: financial crisis
Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts
Friday, January 23, 2009
Regarding more government regulation...
Friday, October 24, 2008
Economic wisdom.
Quote of the Week
'I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.'
Thomas Jefferson 1802
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Tags: Thomas Jefferson financial crisisb
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Thursday, October 09, 2008
A German perspective on the financial crisis and the USA.
From Der Spiegel:The banking crisis is upending American dominance of the financial markets and world politics. The industrialized countries are sliding into recession, the era of turbo-capitalism is coming to an end and US military might is ebbing. Still, this is no time to gloat.
There are days when all it takes is a single speech to illustrate the decline of a world power. A face can speak volumes, as can the speaker's tone of voice, the speech itself or the audience's reaction. Kings and queens have clung to the past before and humiliated themselves in public, but this time it was merely a United States president.
Or what is left of him.Tags: financial crisis
Connecting with the investor class, a huge voting block.
Larry Kudlow:While the presidential candidates were debating in Nashville on Tuesday night the Asian stock markets were selling off by 10 percent. Earlier in the day the U.S. market plunged by 500 points. These were big-time drops, yet presidential debaters never talk about the stock market. Nashville was no exception.
Roughly $2 trillion in U.S. shareholder capital has been lost in the past 15 months. Stocks are down 20 percent over the last month alone. Those are nasty hits. Stock market people are very unhappy campers right now. And the bad-news financial statements for September are now either in the mail or on the kitchen table. But there were no references to investors either by McCain or Obama on Tuesday night. This is nuts.
Tags: investor class Kudlow
Wall Street 101.
Victor Davis Hanson explains the financial debacle:How odd that all those boring lessons from our grandparents turn out to be true in the globalized, hip 21st century: Save your money. Don't borrow what you can't pay back. Look first at a man's character, not his degrees. And if a promised return on an investment seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Cheap politicians are actually very expensive and the same principle applies to CEOs.
Thomas Sowell's perspicacity:The money that can be saved by limiting CEO pay is chump change compared to the money that can be lost because you cannot attract top-notch talent.
Read the whole article.
Congress itself is a classic example of what can happen when penny-wise policies restrict the caliber of people who can be attracted.
No top-level doctor, lawyer, economist, engineer or CEO can become a member of Congress without taking a big pay cut, perhaps costing that person's family millions of dollars over a lifetime.
On the other hand, if you paid every member of Congress a million dollars a year, it would cost less than the cost of even a small government boondoggle, much less a whole agency.
It is not that the turkeys in Congress today deserve a raise. They don't even deserve their current pay. But that is the very reason for attracting different people. Cheap politicians are actually very expensive and the same principle applies to CEOs.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Germany, demographics, and the financial crisis.
The world financial market made simple to understand:Who leaves countries? Mobile people, young people. Which brings me to The Asia Times, and Spengler's take on the subprime fiasco:
Related items: here and here.
Germany's President Horst Koehler has denounced the world financial market as a "monster" using "highly complex financial instruments" to make "massive leveraged investments with minimal capital". Koehler, formerly head of the International Monetary Fund, seems perplexed about the causes of the present crisis, but I can explain them in a way any German can understand.
And he does. In essence, Germany does not have enough young people for its old people to lend money to. So its financial institutions went to where the young people are: America. As Spengler says:
There is nothing complicated about finance. It is based on old people lending to young people. Young people invest in homes and businesses; aging people save to acquire assets on which to retire. The new generation supports the old one, and retirement systems simply apportion rights to income between the generations. Never before in human history, though, has a new generation simply failed to appear.
Sunday, March 02, 2008
South America's most prosperous nation:
There are now two South Americas,” says Chilean economist Rolf Lüders, a former prime minister under Augusto Pinochet. The old South America, which remains mired in populism and Marxist rhetoric, includes Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The new South America is democratic and free-market-oriented, and includes Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. Chile is undoubtedly the most prosperous and stable country in the group, with an annual real growth rate averaging 5.5 percent over the last 15 years and a per-capita annual income of $12,000, the highest in Latin America. The country owes its unqualified success to an oft-vilified group of U.S.-educated free-market economists known as the “Chicago boys,” of whom Lüders, a former student of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, is one.
Read the whole article at City-Journal.
Tags: Chile Milton+Friedman
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
What Bin Laden tried but could not demolish.
Since September 11, the economy hasn't suffered a single down quarter. ... it's been nothing but growth since then. Overall, the American economy is, adjusting for inflation, $1.65 trillion bigger than it was six years ago. To put that gigantic number in some perspective, the U.S. economy has added the equivalent of five Saudi Arabias, eight Irans, 13 Pakistans, or 15 Egypts, depending on your preference. And while 9/11 did cause the stock market to plunge, the Dow is 37 percent higher than it was on Sept. 10, 2001, creating trillions of dollars of new wealth for Americans. What's more, the unemployment rate is 4.6 percent today vs. 5.7 percent back then. Not bad at all.
(Via US News & World Report).
global war on terror economy in laden 9/11 terrorism
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