Economy News

from AIER

Established 1999

New England, USA

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    Sound Money Goes to APEE!

    The Sound Money Project has secured a panel at the 2010 Association of Private Enterprise Education Conference in Las Vegas. Among the authors on this panel are Dr. Edward Stringham, Dr. Gerald O’Driscoll, Jr., and Atlas’s own Marius Gustavson, Leonard Liggio, and Alejandro Chafuen. The conference will take place April 11-13 at Caesar’s Palace. APEE…

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    “Inflation Alert”

    “The 1970s was a decade of stagflation — the concurrence of a rising inflation rate and stagnant economic growth. The U.S. economy has not now reached the double-digit inflation rate (almost 15% by 1981), or the 9% unemployment rate, experienced back then. But the early ’70s, not the decade’s end, offer the more ominous parallels…

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    “China’s Hidden Debt Risks 2012 Crisis”

    “By Shih’s count, China’s debt may reach 39.838 trillion yuan ($5.8 trillion) next year. His forecast for debt-to-GDP compares with an International Monetary Fund estimate for China of 22 percent this year, which excludes local-government liabilities. The IMF sees Spain at 69.6 percent, the U.S. at 94 percent, Greece at 115 percent and Japan at…

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    A Doomsday Cycle

    Economists Peter Boone and Simon Johnson think the economic system could be stuck in a “doomsday cycle”: “Over the last three decades, the US financial system has tripled in size, as measured by total credit relative to GDP. Each time the system runs into problems, the Federal Reserve quickly lowers interest rates to revive it.…

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    Why No Tea Parties in Europe?

    “I’ve been doing a little reading this morning about the Greek crisis and related problems in Europe. One take, and it makes sense to me, is that many European countries have such low fertility rates that even with some degree of immigration, they simply will not have the future population levels necessary to pay for…

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    Regulating the Financial Industry

    Wednesday’s Washington Post featured a column by Steven Pearlstein that sums up the ongoing debate over the regulation of the financial industry, or at least it attempts to do so. As we all know, the collapse of the financial industry played a major role in what has now become a worldwide recession. The obvious response…

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    Put Housing GSEs in the Budget and then Privatize

    “The two large housing government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have been in government receivership since September 2008. The U.S. Treasury has given the housing GSEs $112 billion in cash infusions, and this past Christmas Eve it quietly announced it would cover all of Fannie and Freddie’s losses beyond the original $400 billion limit…

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    “Four Biggest Greek Banks Downgraded”

    “Fitch Ratings, citing concerns about Greek banks’ funding costs and profitability, downgraded the country’s four major banks to triple-B, or two notches above “junk” status. Fitch characterized its outlook for Greek banks as ‘negative’… The cost of funding for the four banks in question—National Bank of Greece, Alpha Bank, Efg Eurobank Ergasias and Piraeus Bank—has…

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    “Greenspan’s Monetary Policy in Retrospect”

    “Critics charge Greenspan with having carried on an excessively expansionary monetary policy, particularly following the recession of 2001. They note how low interest rates were from 2002 through 2004 and argue that those low rates paved the way for everything from high prices at the pump to high prices at the supermarket, from the housing…

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    Sound Money Essay Winners!

    The Atlas Sound Money Project is proud to announce the winners of its 2010 Atlas Sound Money Essay Contest. We are grateful for the carefully crafted, well-reasoned essays that we received from undergraduate and graduate students and young scholars from the think tank and policy communities.   It has been gratifying to see so many who…