Potpourri
* A great WSJ piece by Jerry O’Driscoll from mid-August, “The Fed Can’t Solve Our Economic Woes.” (I believe the effusive von Pepe sent it.)
* OK either Mario Rizzo and Jerry O’Driscoll are wrong, or I am. But in the comments here we can’t agree on supply curves and price movements. BTW, I am not “really” saying that those guys are idiots. What I’m saying is that we are arguing about something pretty basic, and yet, if you read each of our views in isolation–and if you were in a hurry–you would think each of us is right. Weird.
* Glenn Greenwald has another great post, this time on drone attacks in foreign countries. (Believe it or not, there’s more going on than the Almost Mosque in the Vicinity of Ground Zero controversy.) Here’s a good quote:
The illogic and propaganda driving this is so familiar because it’s what has been driving the American National Security State for the last decade. There is anti-Americanism and radicalism in Yemen; therefore, to solve that problem, we’re going to bomb them more with flying killer robots, because nothing helps reduce anti-American sentiments like slaughtering civilians and dropping cluster bombs from the sky.
* David R. Henderson’s new piece in the Freeman opens with this melancholy anecdote:
On a flight from Chicago to Washington, D.C., in 1981, I sat beside a U.S. foreign service officer who had just finished a stint in Moscow. He told me that although he had enjoyed the job, he needed to get his family back to America because he wanted his children to grow up understanding what it was like to live in a free country. His children were only aged five and seven. “In what ways would your children have even known they were not living in a free society?” I asked. He answered: “They noticed that when we traveled, we, and those around us, had to show an ID to a government official. You couldn’t travel freely.”
I’ve been heavily searching for a nice house over the past 15 months for my brother in Northeastern VA, and prices are still failling in this area. The current supply is expanding as foreclosures in this area are accelerating(my local newspaper’s Sunday realestate section had two entire pages devoted to foreclosures, for just one county, 40min outside of D.C). I’ve been to a couple of houses where the owners put their properties on the market and then they remove them after a month or so, but in these cases almost all of the sellers didn’t need to sell their homes. Prices are roughly at 60% of their highs, but buyers are able to purchase below asking value. About 75% of the houses in the price range we’re looking at have been foreclosures. The other 25% of the homes we’ve looked at, where the sellers are on the market for a number of reasons, have had a very low volume of bidders, and the amount of time when homes initially come on to the market until a first bid is submitted seems rather lengthy as well.