Talk show host and conservative icon Rush Limbaugh recently ignited a firestorm of criticism for expressing his desire that Barack Obama should fail. Democrats, and even some Republicans, suggested that he had put aside his patriotism to wish for an economic collapse that would result in political ...
In his first televised speech before Congress, President Obama asserted that prosperity will return once the government restores the flow of credit in the economy. It may come as a surprise to him, but an economy cannot run on consumer loans. Furthermore, credit stopped flowing in the U.S. for a ...
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 ...
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 ...
The intense scrutiny recently paid to my investment strategy in the immediate wake of the financial crisis of the last six months has unfortunately obscured the central element of my larger economic forecast. The standard line has been that although I was able to predict the crash, in the form of ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
As the multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme orchestrated by Wall Street insider Bernard Madoff unravels in the media spotlight, the nation is being presented with a rare opportunity to understand the true nature of many of our most cherished financial structures. Hopefully we have the wisdom to ...
Like many pragmatic economists I have always warned that rapid expansions of government debt would result in inflation and higher interest rates. The explanation was always simple: rising supply of government debt inflates the money supply and weakens the government's ability to service its debt ...