In a recent speech to the Council of Institutional Investors, Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin outlines who’s to blame for the current collapse. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t even mention the Federal Reserve or Fannie or Freddie. Here are some of his bigger howlers with my comments in brackets: Wolin Remarks before the Council of Institutional
Homeowners have started to get wise to the fact that, even if they don’t bother making payments, lenders won’t be evicting the residents any time soon. For a while now, more and more articles have been appearing the press noting big increases in the number of people who simply stop paying their mortgages. In the past, however, the attention has
The national debt will soon be 100 percent of GDP. This isn’t a magic number, of course. Not a whole lot will be different than when the debt is 95 percent of GDP. But it does show that economic growth simply hasn’t been strong enough in the last decade to keep the debt below 100 percent in spite of all the claims that debt means nothing because
The bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has now cost the taxpayer at least 146 billion. By the end, the bailout will likely cost anywhere from $500 billion to $1 trillion. The damage done by Fannie and Freddie is not limited merely to the bailouts. Fannie and Freddie were the main engines behind the securitization drive that drove so much of the
We’ve seen plenty of them in the totally ravaged markets like Las Vegas of course, but some have begun to wonder where all the commercial foreclosures are? We don’t hear about a lot of foreclosures in apartment buildings, for example. Well, apartment buildings won’t foreclosure in large numbers, because, as a substitute good for for-sale housing,
MSNBC today features an article on the job disaster that the GenY/Millennials are facing. These are people born in the 1980s and 1990s who who were unfortunate enough to enter the job market at one of the worst possible times in history. The piece features one person, but if you were wondering how this nice person isn’t able to find a job, you
The Denver Post has an excellent article on the convoluted system of farm subsidies that have produced such heavy production of meat, dairy and grain at the expense of fruits and vegatables. They note that it is more expensive to produce fruits and vegetables, but we could also notice that subsidy to grains, corn, for instance, leads to less farm
It seems that the public relations industry is always trying to distance itself from the image that its main business is in providing “spin” or “spinning the news for its clients. This is true to a certain extent throughout both the public and private sector PR types. Afterall, who doesn’t want to put a good face on corporate earnings or home
Not aggressively enough, it seems. Barry Ritholtz says at his blog that the only way the banks will ever learn is if they lose big judgments in court – a notion that seems to be borne out by another aspect of the Schroit debacle. but this isn’t true, the big banks will learn when the government stops bailing them out. If the market were actually
Shocking news. A representative from the banking industry praises the looting of the taxpayers to benefit his industry. The Chief Economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association (who’s a former Federal Reserve governor) has announced that “without TARP money, without the Federal Reserve program, without the fiscal stimulus programs, the
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.