Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Follow up to a Libertarian future

Reader Jazzbumpa suggests taking a look at Yves Smith’s Journey into a Libertarian Future series as part of Mike’s thought experiment on the subject here. A very good read. He also offers one of his own posts on the matter at Retirement Blues Brute economics of slavery. And opines at the end of his e-mail […]

OWS and economics

Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her post in the NYT Economix begins: The Occupy Wall Street movement, displaced from some key geographic locations, now enjoys a small but significant encampment among economists. Concerns about the impact of growing economic inequality fit neatly into a larger critique of mainstream […]

Closing Wall Street’s casino

Via Reuters comes David Cay Johnston’s musing on Closing Wall Street’s casino: A superb example of a sound rule in law and economics that needs reviving, because it can halt the rampant speculation in derivatives, is the ancient legal principle that gambling debts are not enforceable through court action. Not so long ago — before […]

Hank Paulson and Some Animals Are More Equal than Others

byMike Kimel Barry Ritholtz points us to a Bloomberg article showing, once again, that when it came to measures to prop up the economy in 2008, some animals are more equal than others: Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out. So […]

A Though Experiment: What Would a Perfect Libertarian State Look Like a Hundred Years Later?

byMike Kimel [edited to make authorship clearer] Libertarians come in many flavors, but I think most of them would agree that in an ideal world, the government would be very small and have limited powers – essentially, the government would control national defense and perhaps adjudicate over property rights disputes (i.e., maintain police and/or the […]

Why did the English equivalent of Occupy Wallstreet pick St Paul’s as the place to protest?

[update: Links fixed 11/30.] by Stormy Why did the English equivalent of Occupy Wallstreet pick St Paul’s as the place to protest? Because St. Paul’s is hand in glove with the City of London Corporation, the place where democracy and light “goes to die,” the place where there is no accountability or transparency for the […]

Jobs, jobs, jobs

Hale Stewart of BondDad blog discusses jobs…and jobs… 1. V shaped real retail sales and industrial production recoveries vs. jobs: …Comparing those with private jobs (red) and total payrolls (green), we can see that the percentage losses in sales and production were steeper, and have made up nearly or more than all of their ground […]

Pell grant austerity

The House Appropriations Committee recently offered up a bill that would cut students’ Pell Grants – the cornerstone of the student aid system – by $44 billion over 10 years. The bill, if passed, would slash millions of students’ Pell Grants: completely eliminating grants for more than 550,000 students next year and for more than […]