December 2008

It's Friday and the madness must come to an end. I don't have a lot on the table so I'll leave you with just the usual links. I would say the Madoff stuff is pretty unbelievable. See the first four articles to see what I mean. Other news…

I was chatting with Marshall Auerback about some of my recent posts on Keynesianism and Austrian Economics -- Marshall is a Keynesian -- and he convinced me that my posts were somewhat misleading and that I had only presented half of the…

I am certainly of the view that a considerable worsening of the recession is baked in the cake for 2009. But will fiscal and monetary stimulus prevent worst case scenarios? I certainly hope so, as I have laid out in recent posts. But,…

December is a big month for Hollywood as some of the biggest and most critically acclaimed movies come out in December. One such movie is "The Reader" starring Kate Winslet. I am a big fan, so I thought I'd provide you with a little…

Pre-market trading is not looking good. Everyone is pointing to the auto bailout failure as the cause. If you're in treasuries, you are very happy because yet again the flight to lunacy continues as equity markets sell off.

Recently I wrote a post which claimed that Keynesian stimulus is what we need in the global economy right now. These ideas are considered heresy in Austrian School circles because trying to stimulate the economy out of recession only puts…

Jamie Dimon tells it like it is. When asked by CNBC's Erin Burnett's how business is going, Dimon replied "terrible." Here's how Reuters describes his comments: "November itself has been a terrible trading month ... (and) December so far is…

The Economist does a very good post-mortem on Iceland and its spectacular collapse with a number of lessons for other countries, especially those with oversized financial sectors like Ireland, Switzerland and the U.K.  Below is a snippet…

The big news today (at least in my mind) is the outsized jobless claims number of 573,000. This number confirms the view that the employment situation is worsening quite rapidly. I think we could see 7.2% unemployment next month given…

Caroline Baum had a good column today at Bloomberg in which she suggests central banks consider asset prices in monetary policy going forward. In the piece she quoted William White, a former economist from the Bank for International…