Potpourri
* Some of my thoughts on the recent gold news.
* A student in my private law / private defense class wrote up a post on some new technologies/strategies.
* Pete Boettke links to an exchange between Paul Krugman and Raghuram Rajan. RR destroys Krugman. It’s actually embarrassing.
* Gonzalo Lira made me once again return to the claim that the Fed is allowing banks to earn riskless profits by buying Treasurys. I have gone back and forth on this issue. It always sounded plausible, and explained a bunch of the facts, but certain things didn’t quite fit. Well, now I think I have it all worked out. I think I see how the banks can take excess reserves and buy Treasurys with them, then the government can spend the money on tanks and food stamps, and yet the whole time these are excess reserves just getting shuffled around. I wasn’t quite seeing that before. This will actually be the topic of my article in the October’s Lara-Murphy Report, where I’ll delve into the numbers and actually document that this is happening. (If indeed it is; I haven’t verified it myself yet.)
* Dick Clark (the younger) is actually teaching for a week at Harvard. Can you believe that? I need a better agent. Anyway, Dick is going to be a guest lecturer in this guy’s class.
