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Garrison Rejoinder to DeLong

Here Roger Garrison responds to DeLong’s critique of Garrison’s Freeman article. I think Garrison makes some good points, and he certainly provides the larger context within which to contrast the Austrian versus Keynesian approach to business cycles. However, I don’t know if Garrison made the right move here: DeLong writes that “Garrison and the other […]

Geithner Blames Central Bankers, But Greenspan Only Teeny Weeny Bit

John Cochrane sends this WSJ article relaying portions of a Charlie Rose interview with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (who was head of the NY Fed from late 2003 – January 2009) talking about the causes of the worldwide financial crisis: The revelation [of central bank responsibility] came from Timothy Geithner last Wednesday with PBS’s Charlie […]

Inflation Update

I have been watching certain figures fairly closely, inasmuch as I have been telling everybody to hedge himself (that sounds funny but it’s grammatical?) against possibly huge price increases that will manifest themselves by the end of 2009. Since I hate it when gurus make bold statements that technically aren’t falsifiable, in a recent post […]

Unscientific Commentary at NPR

Uh oh! I was listening to an NPR story on the plight of the polar bears (because of global warming), and the reporter explained that the shrinking ice spelled disaster. Some scientists had proposed a refuge area for the bears, while waiting for the climate to cool back down after the appropriate policies had been […]

Name Dropping

I met some interesting people on my recent travels: * I went to dinner with Kevin Duffy, an Austrian (in the economic sense) hedge fund manager who had quite a good 2008. The industrious von Pepe has located an April 2007 interview with Duffy. * During my lunch talk in the Q&A someone challenged my […]

Vacation in Somalia

There are two problems with this: (1) If I say, “A monopoly institution based on violence makes things worse,” that doesn’t mean, “The absence of such an institution implies paradise.” You might as well say, “Whoa ho ho, you claim to hate dictatorships? Well there weren’t any dictators around during the Mesozoic era, I guess […]

The Peace That Passeth All Understanding

On the plane from Dallas to Nashville, I witnessed the coolest lightning storm I have ever seen. I am not exaggerating, you could see it out the plane’s window for a good 20 minutes, so that means what? It had to be at least 100 miles long? The clouds within which the flashes kept occurring […]

Talk About a Softball

I am in the middle of doing a radio show Saturday night to promote my book. When the show went to its first commercial break, all of a sudden I couldn’t hear anything. Yet, I could tell I was still on the line. So I called the station from my cell phone, while holding the […]