Currently reading bits and pieces of Böhm-Bawerk’s Capital and Interest, The Distributist Review and sporadically, Marx’s Kapital. No stone unturned, as the saying goes…
Busy busy… a few cross-country trips for work, and trying to hit the slopes occasionally and plan my mid-winter ski-trip, along with reading the above items my RSS reader is out of control and my “homepage” is a growing list of compelling articles and blog posts I wanted to comment on but didn’t. I guess that’s probably because none of them were compelling enough to make me lose sleep. I’ve been more active than is necessary or prudent debating with trolls at Reddit|Economics and Reddit|Anarchism , the latter of which FYI is full of communists; not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I get about as much mileage out of “class warfare” and “exploitation theory” as I get out of “the illuminati” and “the U.S. government is not a country, it’s a corporation!”.
I’m anticipating a glorious return to more frequent blogging in the near future, I’ve been writing a bunch of stuff that I haven’t been able to finish yet. In the meantime, here is at least one item you haven’t seen anywhere else:
+++
Don Byrne was one of my professors in grad school, and now teaches at University of Detroit Mercy. He issues an occasional online economic newsletter, in which he makes great use of charts, and PG-rated but colorful language. His latest economic newsletter is out. It’s titled The Financial Fiasco of 2008: Financial Rescue or Gang Rape of the Taxpayer?
The two major sparks, so to speak that caused the ignition are the cartelization of the U.S. petroleum industry that occurred mostly between the mid-1990s and was pretty much completed by 2002. The second factor was the ill advised policy of monetary restraint of the FED which began in mid-2004. This was the second time in a period of around six years that the FED aided and abetted a collapse in the U.S. economy, the first being in the first three quarters of 2000.
Check the chart in particular, showing the FED funds rate side-by-side with the the spot price of oil over the last 7 years.
Rational Expectations, the “Fisher Effect”, Long Term Capital Mangement, the cartelization of the domestic oil industry, an analysis of credit, default, and interest rate risk. Marie Antoinette.
Really? Just great stuff, the best Newsletter of his that I’ve read, yet.
+++