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The Nigerian Miracle?

In a passage in my upcoming book I made an offhand remark about Nigeria, and I went to Wikipedia to make sure I wasn’t saying something dumb. (For one thing, I wanted to make sure “Nigeria” was an official place back in the 1940s.) I came across this rather startling passage: According to the Economist […]

A Less Immodest Proposal

In a previous post I explained that President-elect Obama could do a lot more good (given his publicly stated objectives) by identifying, say, the 10 million households most in jeopardy and then cutting them checks. That would make a heck of a lot more sense than what they’re going to do instead, where even Obama […]

Peter Schiff Warns of the Bubble in Treasurys

Note that I am not simply heeding him, since he was was right about the the housing bubble. If I had briefed him before this interview, I couldn’t have been happier with Schiff’s responses (HT2LRC): Unfortunately, I think what’s going to happen to a lot of regular Americans is this: They got spanked in their […]

Coining a New Term for the Coming Economic Disaster

OK kids, I think we are in store for a very severe recession (i.e. depression) and very big price increases. It will be stagflation but worse. So we need a catchy term. The two contenders I’ve come up with are infression and depflation, but the first is hard to pronounce and the latter is very […]

Obama Nominates a Socialist

President-elect Obama has tapped former EPA head Carol Browner to take “on a broad new portfolio with responsibility for Obama’s ambitious agenda on the environment, energy and climate change.” Guess what? She’s a socialist. Really. I grant you, she’s no longer listed at the Socialist International website, but she used to be. “Oh, back in […]

Austrians and Keynesians Agree: Milton Was Wrong About the Depression

I don’t usually find much of value in Paul Krugman’s articles, but in this piece he relates something very important: For many years most economists believed that preventing another Great Depression would be easy. In 2003, Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago, in his presidential address to the American Economic Association, declared that the […]

Tyler Cowen Went to the Dark Side a Long Time Ago

You think I’m referring to his (always very qualified and nuanced!) support for government intervention? Nope, I am being quite literal. Today in a post designed to bring new readers up to speed with what his blog is all about, Tyler links to his 2005 post on Star Wars. Now in fairness, go read his […]

Kling Compares Stimulus to the Somme

Arnold Kling today presents the single best criticism of the stimulus that I have seen, relying on Public Choice/Austrian-type arguments rather than mainstream economics. An excerpt: Mark Thoma gives us Joseph Stiglitz and Martin Feldstein being interviewed by Charlie Rose. I listened to it last night, and I found it so chilling that it adversely […]