Potpourri
* Here’s a great Wenzel analysis of censorship (perhaps self-imposed) in financial reporting. At a New York conference recently Luo Ping, a director-general at the China Banking Regulatory Commission, said, “We hate you guys. Once you start issuing $1 trillion-$2 trillion [$1,000bn-$2,000bn] . . .we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys but there is nothing much we can do.” It’s amazing to see what the major US media did with the original story.
* Another great post by Mario Rizzo, further proving that Keynes would not have been a (modern) Keynesian. By the 1940s, Keynes realized that massive bursts of government deficit spending wouldn’t fix the problem if the economy were still plagued by massive uncertainty about the future.
* Here Brad DeLong lends his support to the “Employee Free Choice Act.” Now far be it from me to oppose employees’ freedom–I guess the Republicans should introduce a “Was Slavery Really So Bad?” act–but if we’re trying to fight unemployment, I don’t see how, say, tripling the fines on employers (for infractions of labor laws regarding voting for unionization) is a move in the right direction. Incidentally, I speak from some (limited) experience: I was a member of the United Auto Workers for a few years. “What?!?!” you ask. You see, the UAW came in and unionized the graduate students at NYU, who were close to death from their onerous tasks of grading exams and such, while being paid to get PhDs. I’ll explain the hijinx that ensued during the UAW campaign in a future post.
