Economy
It seems increasingly relevant so here is a re-run of a February 7, 2009 post, with some updates: As Obama, Pelosi and Reid accelerate the implementation of statist practices in America – building on what Bush started – it is helpful and necessary to reacquaint ourselves with fundamental economic principles and some specific significant issues…
It takes more than one entity to blow up an economy, but Congress is auspiciously positioned to deflect the blame that it ought to shoulder. Writes James Pethokoukis: It’s not news that many senators appear to have only a tenuous grasp of the financial industry. But Glassman’s larger point is more relevant. It’s not just…
Folks fond of those politically motivated “clocks” that show how much something has cost or how long we have to some catastrophe should update their debt clocks. According to Moody’s, the United States could be just a few years from a credit rating downgrade: Spiraling debt is Uncle Sam’s shock collar, and its jolt may…
The necessary qualifier is that I agree with Mark Patinkin about the immoral behavior of Goldman Sachs. If I had money to invest, I would most definitely invest it elsewhere, and if I already had that money with Goldman, I’d move it. There’s a moral obligation to punish companies, in that way, and it’s the…
Sometimes you get a glimpse behind the closed doors of powerful people’s decision-making rooms, and it’s interesting how familiar names keep popping up. An Investor’s Business Daily editorial on the Chicago Climate Exchange provides such an inkling. The CCX is up and running as a mechanism for trading offsets for “all six greenhouse gases.” It…
Big government, whom some foolishly think is the pathway to so-called social justice for the little guy, actually has the opposite effect. It incentivizes big corporations, big unions and other powerful organizations to feed at the enlarged government trough to buy favors at the expense of those unable to pay for a place at the…
Obama: Now, what we’re doing, I want to be clear, we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. What does “success fairly earned” or “enough money” mean? Who defines “success fairly earned” or “enough money”? What…
Senator Carl Levin (D, MI) strode right past the fundamental problem while lambasting Goldman Sachs executives (emphasis added): Wall Street is on the wrong side of this fight. It insists that reining in that — those excesses would unduly restrict the free market that is the engine of American progress. But this — this market…
Veronique De Rugy argues that deregulation was not the culprit in the current economic crisis: The great villain in the deregulation myth is the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1999, which repealed some restrictions of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, namely those preventing bank holding companies from owning other kinds of financial…
I suppose another unelected panel and some municipal and state mandates can only do so much additional harm: Rhode Island may take another step toward addressing climate change issues if the General Assembly passes legislation initiated by students in the environmental studies program at Brown University. The bill, introduced by Sen. Joshua Miller, D-Cranston, calls…