For most Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.
Economists don’t usually make good speculators, because they think too much.
The planet will continue to cook.
Surely I’m not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?
People who are complaining about the Fed are people who’ve been predicting runaway inflation for five and six years, and it hasn’t happened.
Anyone who thinks that the last 80 years, ever since FDR took us off gold, have been a doomed venture, that strikes me as kind of cranky.
I think Stockman is an interesting sort of amalgam.
You really have to go searching desperately to find any contemporary examples of good, old-fashioned runaway inflation.
What the Depression teaches us is that when the economy is so depressed that even a zero interest rate isn’t low enough, you have to put conventional notions of prudence and sound policy aside.
Tax cuts were not going to be effective at creating jobs, and the job creation record is lousy.
I really think that people have to think safety; taking risks for higher yield is a bad idea once you’re in late or latish middle age.
When the Fed decides that inflation is too high, they have the tools, and they’ve shown historically that they have the will, to bring it down. And, it might be painful.
There’s one thing that the Fed has been really good at cracking down on, and that’s inflation.
It’s a funny thing, by the way, how people who love free markets are also quite sure that they know that investors are being irrational.
Asset bubbles have happened even without not-so-easy money. And, in a depressed economy, where alternative uses of money are not great, people are going to bid up the prices of profitable corporations and stuff like that.
The world economy is in a nosedive, and understanding what I call “depression economics” – the weird world you get into when even a zero interest rate isn’t low enough, and a messed-up financial system is dragging down the real economy – is essential if we’re going to avoid the worst.
Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.
One is reminded of the old joke about the centipede who was asked how he managed to coordinate his 100 legs : He started thinking about it and could never walk properly again.
Some people want the past repeated and have an interest in making sure we don’t remember it.
Now that Eastern Europe is free from the alien ideology of Communism, it can return to its true historical path – fascism.
And I’m with Alan Greenspan, who – surprisingly, given his libertarian roots – has repeatedly warned that growing inequality poses a threat to “democratic society.” It may take some time before we muster the political will to counter that threat. But the first step toward doing something about inequality is to abandon the 80–20 fallacy. It’s time to face up to the fact that rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the modest gains of college graduates.