With millions of homeowners now struggling to repay money they clearly never should have borrowed, our leaders have been righteously wagging fingers at predatory lenders who allegedly enticed innocent borrowers, and the country, into a financial snake pit. While the mortgage industry clearly deserves a good share of the blame, unindicted co-conspirators abound. The ringleaders are still at-large and are, in … [Read More]

“Bush Boom Continues” trilled the headline over the Lawrence Kudlow column, as George W. Bush closed out his seventh year in office. “You can call it Goldilocks 2.0,” purred Kudlow. Yes, you could. But what a difference 12 months can make. Final returns are now in on the eight years of George Bush. Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services has crunched … [Read More]

There is nearly universal agreement that the opening salvo of the Obama Administration’s campaign to restore health to the financial system, delivered this week by new Treasury Secretary Geithner, fell with a loud and ugly thud. The most common criticism is that the announcement was short on detail. What is abundantly clear, however, is that the new Administration intends to push … [Read More]

So cheer up! Austin’s essay on the distinction between “tragic” and “comic” libertarianism was sparked, I gather, from some email conversations between the two of us in which I’ve been waxing tragic (if not always displaying my devotion to liberty.) I remember nudging Austin to invest in some gold bullion in order to protect his family’s wealth from Ben Bernanke’s money … [Read More]

I grew up accustomed to bull markets and rising prosperity. Now I’d like to know whether they will ever resume. It would be nice if libertarianism—a family of ideologies with which I have a great tell of sympathy—could tell us the answer.  Unfortunately, the answers it gives are inconcsistent.  Libertarianism has two faces, which I call the comic and the tragic. … [Read More]

“British jobs for British workers!” thundered Gordon Brown, as he emerged from the shadow of Tony Blair to become prime minister. His populist sloganeering has now come back to bite him. Across Britain, thousands laid down tools in wildcat strikes in solidarity with a walkout from a French-owned oil refinery in North Killinghome—to protest a $300 million contract to an Italian … [Read More]

My popularity on television and the internet has led a very small money manager to use his popular financial blog to promote his fledgling business by attacking the recent poor performance of my long-term investment strategy. The post is causing quite a stir and compels me to provide some badly needed context. To achieve his ends, this individual has distorted much … [Read More]

This week, in a speech before the London School of Economics, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke offered a perverse economic theory in his quest to gather support for never-ending Wall Street bailouts: “This disparate treatment, unappealing as it is, appears unavoidable. Our economic system is critically dependent on the free flow of credit, and the consequences for the broader economy of financial … [Read More]

A few weeks ago when the Fed announced a strategy designed to bring down long-term interest and home mortgage rates through unlimited Treasury bond purchases, government debt staged a spectacular rally. To the unschooled market observer, the spike may be difficult to understand. After all, why would the value of Treasury bonds rise while their underlying credit quality is deteriorating faster … [Read More]

It won’t come as a great shock to anyone that the current state of the financial markets shows that we’ve still quite a bit to learn about economics. While there were indeed those observers (some of them even economists!) who pointed to the housing bubble, its unsustainable nature and the oddity of funding it by borrowing back the money we’d sent … [Read More]