Martin Feldstein: Houston, We Have A Problem

By -
Feldstein says this could be the worst recession since WWII. I told you so back in October. (That is, after I told you not back in January of 2007.)

Comments

  1. Tim Swanson4:47 AM

    In your piece from a year ago, very few analysts predicted that the credit crunch would be as severe as it is today. Nor did many observers believe that the dollar would lose as much value.

    The reason I mention this is because in your last footnote, you mention a $50 range. However, oil actually surpassed $90USD last year... arguably due to economic "terrorism" in the form of inflation and free loans.

    Still the same, good piece.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bob Murphy9:52 AM

    Well, what happened is that I had been bewitched by my former employer, and thought that oil prices were coming down. (They were around $60/barrel when I wrote that piece.)

    So if oil prices really did come down, then that would've reduced the trade deficit and pressure on the dollar.

    Also, the people I was arguing with were just saying, "Fiat money bad! Trade deficit bad!" They weren't giving specific reasons for the economy to do poorly at that time.

    Then after I quit my job and delved into the data on my own, I saw things that I hadn't noticed before. In particular, I looked at the Fed's handling of interest rates and realized just how crazy the 2003-2004 period was. So that's when I got scared.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Peter2:17 PM

    And we all know who to blame for it.

    http://www.gopcatholics.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights

By -
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Read more

St. Paul and I Agree...

By -
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
Read more

Libertarianism and Violence, II

By -
I decided to move some discussion from this post up to the top level here. Specifically, Watoosh wrote: "Well, if violence is defined as initiation of force (which, of course, presupposes certain property rights), then I think Rockwell is correct..." Well, if we define cats as elephants, then many people keep elephants in their house. More seriously, firstly, violence is not usually defined that way. It's defined as, you know, violence, so that, say, someone may respond violently or non-violently to someone who aggresses against them. Otherwise, it would make no sense to say, for instance, "He punched me, but I did not stoop to violence in response." And, secondly, the libertarian usage of "initiation of force" is very offbeat. If I wander onto someone's meadow, most people would not say I had "initiated force" -- I mean, sure, I used "force" against the earth to push off walking, but that's not force directed against...
Read more