Thanks to the folks at the Mises Institute, Professor George Selgin of the University of Georgia (!) has a superb presentation on the failings of the Federal Reserve. George was one of my professors at George Mason University back in the 1980s and is one of the world’s experts on competing currencies. This video is […]

Maybe I’m crazy, or maybe I’m just getting into the Christmas spirit, but I saw this photo of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke on the Drudge Report and my mind instantly connected his image with this character from “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.” This might explain Bernanke’s QE2 policy. I can see a film being released […]

I’m utterly envious at how this video has gone viral, but I have to admit that it is quite clever. I don’t think my flat tax videos, for instance, have quite the same flair. In any event, one imagines “the Ben Bernank” is probably not happy about  this production. If you really want to understand the […]

I have a column in today’s New York Post, where I pull no punches as I comment on how the rest of the world is increasingly worried about Obama’s policies of easy money and deficit spending. I note that other nations often are guilty of the same mistakes, but that’s no excuse for America sinking to […]

One of my first blog posts (and the first one to get any attention) highlighted the amusing/embarrassing irony of having Chinese students laugh at Treasury Secretary Geithner when he claimed the United States had a strong-dollar policy.

I suspect that even Tim “Turbotax” Geithner would be smart enough to avoid such a claim today, not after the Fed’s announcement (with the full support of the White House and Treasury) that it would flood the economy with $600 billion of hot money.

Chairman Ben Bernanke has announced that the Federal Reserve will buy about $600 billion of government bonds as part of what is being called QE2 (because this is the second big stage of “quantitative easing”). This actually isn’t printing money, but it has the same effect in that it creates more liquidity by putting more […]

Two CNBC stories are linked on the Drudge Report this morning, and they both highlight the growing risk of the Fed’s easy-money policy. The first story discusses whether the dollar will continue to depreciate. Since the “optimist” argument is based on global instability, this is hardly encouraging regardless of what you think will happen to […]

In the “Five Things About Me” section of my blog, I included this blurb: A left-wing newspaper in the U.K. wrote that I’m “a high priest of light tax, small state libertarianism.” I assume they meant it as an insult, but it’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me. I now have something new […]

George Melloan’s column in the Wall Street Journal discusses the new Basel capital standards and correctly observes that 22 years of global banking regulations have not generated good results. This is not because requiring reserves is a bad thing, but rather because such policies do nothing to fix the real problem. In the case of […]

The Free Market Mojo site asked me a number of interesting questions about public policy. I’m not sure all of my answers were interesting, but here are some snippets that capture my curmudgeonly outlook. I think it’s important to divide the topic into two issues, the policies that cause short-run fluctuations and the policies that […]