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Why Aren’t the Fed Injections Leading to Massive Price Inflation?

As longtime Free Advice readers know, my favorite graph lately has been of the monetary base, which consists of currency plus bank reserves on deposit with the Fed. (Note that a broader definition of money, M1, includes total demand deposits, i.e. checking accounts, whereas the monetary base doesn’t.) In contrast to the broader measures of […]

The Policeman Is Not Your Friend

I realize I get cynical a lot here, but check out this story from Galveston. (HT2LRC) I’m not even going to comment. It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn’s home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked […]

Bryan Caplan Gets Pre-Emptively Attacked by Hawks

Over at EconLog, Bryan Caplan made a surprisingly courageous post about disarmament. Now granted, Caplan’s argument wasn’t airtight, but give the guy a break; you’re not going to get world peace with a few paragraphs. Anyway, the majority of commentators lecture Bryan about human nature, A is A, therefore we need nukes, etc., but this […]

Robert Wenzel Gives Me Props on Paulson

Robert Wenzel and I have formed a mutual fan club, which means I don’t have to toot my own horn on my Paulson call. The entirety of Wenzel’s post (and note my convention here, that I don’t italicize my own words to avoid confusion): Bob Murphy Is Going to Flip On Wednesday, Bob Murphy wrote […]

Great (and Depressing) TV Show About the New Deal

Bryan Caplan and David Henderson have been raving about this half-hour Canadian show on the New Deal, and boy they were right. Like David, I intended to just watch a few minutes, and finally around 20 minutes into it I decided to stop agonizing, and just resolve to watch the whole thing. What’s really amazing […]

They Don’t Teach You This in Law School

This is a very interesting story about a lawsuit between Texaco and Pennzoil, told by Carl Icahn, described by Wikipedia as a corporate raider and the 46th richest man in the world. (HT2EPJ) Incidentally, there are a few naughty words so watch yourself.

The Great Credit Thaw

Von Pepe passes along this 5-minute CNBC video. A small potatoes banker from Montana was just about to explain why the Fed rate cuts were devastating his business, and then the feed mysteriously gets interrupted, ruining his presentation. A random glitch, or sinister corporate censorship of anti-Bernanke sentiment? Who can say.

Battening Down the Hatches vis-a-vis Credit Cards

I have been telling Free Advice readers for months that the conventional old school wisdom is not necessarily correct in the present environment. Yes yes, you should cut your spending and save, but this doesn’t mean you should pay down your credit card balances. However, there is a point of clarification that is in order. […]