About the direction the Republican Party should take, Craig Shirley said: “The 2008 campaign was never an honest choice between conservatism and liberalism. Really, it was just a referendum on George Bush,” said Craig Shirley, a consultant and author of a forthcoming book on the 1980 presidential campaign. Shirley thinks equating Democratic values with socialism [...]

Socialism/Communism has largely caused the collapse of any nation that’s truly tried it. Russia is the biggest example; China has seen the writing on the wall and has allowed economic modernization and liberalism to creep into their country to keep the system moving. Even most of Europe, who we libertarians would consider democratic socialists, understand [...]

Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the [...]

From The Economist’s Free Exchange Blog, discussing Boeing’s layoffs and our Fed’s response to the economic crisis: This is fortuitous—Boeing, as it happens, manufactures helicopters. It would seem that Ben Bernanke is in the market for one. And yet, somehow I’m sure Bernanke won’t be flying over my house with that chopper…

I’ve pointed out the old saying — “If you owe the bank $5,000 and can’t pay, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $5,000,000,000 and can’t pay, the bank has a problem.” Well, the bank has a problem: What he might have said was that the nations funding the majority of America’s public [...]

So, as evidence that I’ve never taken a true macroeconomics course, today was the first time I’ve ever seen this equation… M – Monetary base V – Velocity of money P – Price level y – Real GDP People have asked my how I can claim the Fed/Treas are inflating when P and y are [...]

Extreme obesity could be defined as an abnormally large accumulation of body fat. Consequences of obesity include illness, disability and death. While treatment options vary (i.e. dieting, liposuction, medications, surgery), increasing caloric, fatty or carbohydrate intake clearly isn’t the correct solution. In other words, you aren’t going to shed 10,631,467,593,243.45 pounds by consuming a 7,940,000,000,000.00 [...]

From The Economist’s Free Exchange blog, the Brits are learning that you can’t play the King when you’re only a Duke: Do not do as America does, unless you are a very big country (or economic bloc). That seems to be the lesson Britain is learning as the pound weakens and confidence in the credit [...]

MSM advice about Obama’s inauguration: So you’re attending an inaugural ball saluting the historic election of Barack Obama in the worst economic climate in three generations. Can you get away with glitzing it up and still be appropriate, not to mention comfortable and financially viable? To quote the man of the hour: Yes, you can. [...]

Kevin Drum is looking at the benefits of massive fiscal stimulus as well as tax cuts… And he wonders why we don’t do both? Stimulus spending can (we hope) help keep the economy afloat over the next couple of years, but then what? When the economy starts to recover, it will certainly be helped along [...]

Many people have expressed a hope that Barack Obama will be an improvement over George Bush and that he will roll back some of George Bush’s excesses.  They see in Obama a man who understands nuanced argument, who at least acknowledges that those who oppose his policies can have good reasons and arguments for doing [...]

Felix Salmon sees an odd silver lining in 7.2% unemployment: Maybe the only real upside to this report is that it should light a fire under Congress to pass a stimulus package sooner rather than later — including the release of the second tranche of TARP funds. Let’s start getting money out the door now: [...]

Kevin Drum, in response to a Tyler Cowen post explaining that we have very little evidence that fiscal stimulus actually works, suggests we try it anyway: But do we need examples? I’d argue that we’re basically in terra incognita today. In the postwar era, we’ve virtually never seen an industrialized country, let alone the whole [...]

Money is critical to civilization. Without it, the capital improvements and complex economic processes are impossible, and there will be a very weak form division of labor. Money allows humanity to rise above the savagery of stone age existence. Yet most people don’t understand what money is, how it is created and how it can [...]

Financial analysts are starting to notice a disturbing correlation between the present economic crisis and the roots of the stagnation that gripped Japan for the better part of a decade starting in the 1990s. In today’s New York Times, for example, Martin Flacker notes a surprising similarity between what the Federal Reserve has been doing [...]

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” Ludwig Von Mises After [...]

Last week, I posted about my belief that oil has currently dropped to a price level that is damaging to the long-term stability of the oil market, and that while it seems wonderful right now, it won’t last. Today we find a bit of evidence that may only support this point: The $25 low-end estimate [...]

Lance over at QandO posted this, and it really puts the scope of the thing into perspective when you have it in line-item form: Just where is all this money going to come from, anyway?

No, not for the reason these guys think: Venezuela will back repeated cuts in OPEC oil production until prices stabilize, Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez says, and Russia is proposing closer cooperation with the oil cartel. Ramirez said Wednesday that his country will back a proposed 1 million barrel per day cut when OPEC meets Saturday [...]

Back in March of 2007, I posted this: So here’s what I see. The slowdown in the subprime mortgage and building industries will increasingly push the default and foreclosure rate up. As a result, the mortgage-backed securities market and other housing-based stocks, which are reaching insane levels of “irrational exuberance” and are often highly leveraged [...]