The bailout of Bear Stearns was a mere appetizer to the cliff we’re falling over now.

Market theory would tell us the government should not intervene–these institutions should be allowed to fail, the unwise investments allowed to collapse and the money to be lost. At the last height of Laissez-faire economic policy, in the 1920’s, that was the plan. The institutions were allowed to collapse one-by-one, causing the Great Depression.

That didn’t work out so well. In the 1930’s, sifting through the rubble of the US economy, the next plan was regulation.

We’re now left in the worst situation: Propping up failing deregulated markets with taxpayer dollars.

Bored tonight, I’ve been playing around with the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices dataset that was just released. With all the hysterical coverage around the housing bubble, it seemed like fun to use some of my high school calculus.
Yeah, yeah, I could just graph the index over time, but why not graph the derivative? Ah yes. [...]

Happy tenth birthday, European Central Bank! My, how you’ve grown. Why? Because it’s hard to be a little bit pregnant. The EU represents the only true free trade agreement between nations today.
Grab any responsible economist, and they’ll admit to you that free trade requires radical changes between countries. Ahem, in short, to get the theoretical [...]

Have you heard Obama’s Cooper Union Speech? You should.

The key except:
A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it. That’s why we’ve put in place rules of the road: to make competition fair and open, and honest…
I think that all of us [...]

The deadly, fraudulent, heparin sold by a Chinese manufacturer to Baxter shares much with the deadly, fraudulent, wheat gluten and gluttonous, fraudulent, financial crisis.
These frauds are not accidents, slips of care, but rather deliberate attempts to game tests of quality, to turn garbage into gold.
The toxic wheat gluten was doped with melamine, in a brilliant [...]

Kenneth Rogoff, the former chief economist at the IMF and now a professor at Harvard University, said the greenback may drop another 12 percent on a trade-weighted basis.“This recession will be long and deep and when we get out of it, we’ll have inflation,”

How did this happen? This stick-figure cartoons sorts it out for [...]