Regulation
-
“Gambling with Other People’s Money”
“Beginning in the mid-1990s, home prices in many American cities began a decade-long climb that proved to be an irresistible opportunity for investors. Along the way, a lot of people made a great deal of money. But by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, too many of these investments turned out…
-
“A Three-Point Plan to Save the Euro”
“The rescue package requested by Greece will, if endorsed, buy the eurozone six months, perhaps a year at most. By then, the Greek government will have exhausted the aid and be forced to ask for more or to borrow at astronomical rates. This assumes that, before then, Greece does not precipitate into an even deeper…
-
An Economy of Liars
Free markets depend on truth telling. Prices must reflect the valuations of consumers; interest rates must be reliable guides to entrepreneurs allocating capital across time; and a firm’s accounts must reflect the true value of the business. Rather than truth telling, we are becoming an economy of liars. The cause is straightforward: crony capitalism. Thomas…
-
“Fed Kohn Paper: Crisis Early Warning Requires Better Data”
“While, in hindsight, some of the data available to the Federal Reserve and other authorities gave notice of the financial crisis, more data and a different approach to analyzing them are needed if a reliable ‘early warning system’ for future crises is to be developed, according to research by Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn…
-
“Irresponsible lending prohibited by OTF”
“The new requirements form part of new guidance from the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to counteract irresponsible lending. ‘[We] expect all consumer credit businesses to fully comply with both the word and spirit of this guidance,’ the OFT said. The regulator can ultimately suspend a lender’s consumer credit licence.” Read more. “Irresponsible lending…
-
Obama’s Mortgage Plan Won’t Bring Relief
“Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and the rest of the crew running economic policy somehow could not see the housing bubble as it grew to more than $8tn. It really should have been hard to miss. Nationwide house prices had just tracked overall inflation for 100 years from 1895 to 1995. Suddenly in 1995, coinciding with…
-
“Break Up the Banks”
“Big banks are bad for free markets. Far from being engines of free enterprise, they are conducive to what might be called ‘crony capitalism,’ ‘corporatism,’ or, in Jonah Goldberg’s provocative phrase, ‘liberal fascism.’ There is a free-market case for breaking up large financial institutions: that our big banks are the product, not of economics, but…
-
“Bailout Bonanza”
“Sen. Chris Dodd’s latest bill to fix the financial system is another failure. After months of negotiation, he’s produced a “reform” of the regulatory system that simply fails to deal with the causes of the 2008 crisis — which nearly saw the collapse of the US banking system. Reform is urgently needed, but the senator…
-
“Placing our faith in economic oracles”
“One of the sadder categories in the history of human misfortunes is the list of those things that are obvious, but wrong. By definition, if something is obvious, most people agree with it, and thus, it is likely to win the day – but lose the verdict of history. The Earth is flat – obviously.…
-
“More Muscle to Fed”
“Mr. Dodd’s bill would allow the Fed to examine any bank-holding company with more than $50 billion in assets, and large financial companies that aren’t banks could be lassoed into the Fed’s supervisory orbit. This came after Treasury officials pushed Mr. Dodd to bring more companies under the Fed’s purview. Any financial company, from small…
-
“Gambling with Other People’s Money”
“Beginning in the mid-1990s, home prices in many American cities began a decade-long climb that proved to be an irresistible opportunity for investors. Along the way, a lot of people made a great deal of money. But by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, too many of these investments turned out…
-
“A Three-Point Plan to Save the Euro”
“The rescue package requested by Greece will, if endorsed, buy the eurozone six months, perhaps a year at most. By then, the Greek government will have exhausted the aid and be forced to ask for more or to borrow at astronomical rates. This assumes that, before then, Greece does not precipitate into an even deeper…
-
An Economy of Liars
Free markets depend on truth telling. Prices must reflect the valuations of consumers; interest rates must be reliable guides to entrepreneurs allocating capital across time; and a firm’s accounts must reflect the true value of the business. Rather than truth telling, we are becoming an economy of liars. The cause is straightforward: crony capitalism. Thomas…
-
“Fed Kohn Paper: Crisis Early Warning Requires Better Data”
“While, in hindsight, some of the data available to the Federal Reserve and other authorities gave notice of the financial crisis, more data and a different approach to analyzing them are needed if a reliable ‘early warning system’ for future crises is to be developed, according to research by Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn…
-
“Irresponsible lending prohibited by OTF”
“The new requirements form part of new guidance from the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to counteract irresponsible lending. ‘[We] expect all consumer credit businesses to fully comply with both the word and spirit of this guidance,’ the OFT said. The regulator can ultimately suspend a lender’s consumer credit licence.” Read more. “Irresponsible lending…
-
Obama’s Mortgage Plan Won’t Bring Relief
“Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and the rest of the crew running economic policy somehow could not see the housing bubble as it grew to more than $8tn. It really should have been hard to miss. Nationwide house prices had just tracked overall inflation for 100 years from 1895 to 1995. Suddenly in 1995, coinciding with…
-
“Break Up the Banks”
“Big banks are bad for free markets. Far from being engines of free enterprise, they are conducive to what might be called ‘crony capitalism,’ ‘corporatism,’ or, in Jonah Goldberg’s provocative phrase, ‘liberal fascism.’ There is a free-market case for breaking up large financial institutions: that our big banks are the product, not of economics, but…
-
“Bailout Bonanza”
“Sen. Chris Dodd’s latest bill to fix the financial system is another failure. After months of negotiation, he’s produced a “reform” of the regulatory system that simply fails to deal with the causes of the 2008 crisis — which nearly saw the collapse of the US banking system. Reform is urgently needed, but the senator…
-
“Placing our faith in economic oracles”
“One of the sadder categories in the history of human misfortunes is the list of those things that are obvious, but wrong. By definition, if something is obvious, most people agree with it, and thus, it is likely to win the day – but lose the verdict of history. The Earth is flat – obviously.…
-
“More Muscle to Fed”
“Mr. Dodd’s bill would allow the Fed to examine any bank-holding company with more than $50 billion in assets, and large financial companies that aren’t banks could be lassoed into the Fed’s supervisory orbit. This came after Treasury officials pushed Mr. Dodd to bring more companies under the Fed’s purview. Any financial company, from small…
Newsletter
Liberty and prosperity
at your fingertips.
By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive marketing emails from: . You can revoke your consent to receive emails at any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe® link, found at the bottom of every email. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact