Potpourri

Archive for Potpourri

Potpourri

* Stimulus Tracker: CNNMoney clocks it at $4.7 trillion in total stimulus so far. It’s a neat little graphic breaking it all down. (Hint: Most of it is via the Fed.) * What really made me skeptical about the White House’s “support” for Bernanke and Geithner, was this anonymous email that uses the word “honestly” […]

Potpourri

* Tom Singleton sends along this troubling article about the way the feds might came after 401(k) assets. Incidentally, this is one of the “real world”-type reasons that made me more receptive to Nelson Nash’s Infinite Banking Concept. Nash argues that it’s silly to take the returns in your 401(k) at face value, because even […]

Potpourri

* Steve Landsburg blows up Robert Gibbs on wind power. Now Landsburg accuses Krugman of being asleep at the wheel, but I hadn’t heard Gibbs’ comment, and I work for an energy think tank. So let’s give Krugman a pass; he was too busy not apologizing to Jim Manzi. * A nice compilation of Roderick […]

Potpourri

OK my Potpourri-links holder was starting to resemble the Fed’s balance sheet, so time to dump: * Bryan Caplan shows you how to get on TV [.pdf] without even shaving. * Robert Wenzel explains how the government will crash the housing market–again. * Apparently Iran’s nuclear development is similar to the planet’s “running out of […]

Potpourri

* Carlos Lara passes along this WSJ article explaining that “Gold Is the New Tupperware.” * I heard a very moving story on NPR about WW2 conscientious objectors who ended up working in state mental institutions. The conditions were so awful that a few of them decided they had to do something, so they smuggled […]

Potpourri

* I know we rarely say nice things about Matt Yglesias around here, so I should point out this really good post arguing that the comparison of legislation to sausage making is unfair to the sausage makers. * EPJ links to a very interesting story about how Business Insider got hacked. Really, you should check […]

Potpourri: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid Edition

The translucent von Pepe sent me some scary articles today. I am not in the warp and woof of the markets enough to say whether the below excerpts are 100% right, but they definitely express the foreboding that von Pepe and I share. * This FT article talks about hedge funds betting on rising bond […]

Potpourri

* It’s the clash of the titans over at Crash Landing, concerning a popular and allegedly circular argument against the State. * TokyoTom takes a break from discussing my income stream to pointing out the ominous WSJ series on financial “reform.” (I think it’s like health care “reform.”) * A naive economist allows his anti-Fed […]