The US Department of Agriculture highlights how the United States in the last decade, despite increased aggregate wealth, slid back significantly in terms of food insecurity as measure of poverty. With everyone now focused on the unemployment situation, it bears noting that even before the downturn in the economy there had been a large surge [...]

The Obama Administration is captured. To understand why it has acted as it has, one doesn’t have to take the view that its efforts to save the banking industry were a deliberate attempt to line bankers’ pockets by transferring money from taxpayers to the banking industry. One need merely read the last post I wrote [...]

The title of this post is somewhat misleading – designed to be provocative to get you to read what I have to say. Indeed, I am going to defend Goldman Sach’s right to pay what it likes to its employees. But, I am also going to defend your right to be outraged and to look [...]

In one of my latest posts I said “greed is not good.” Quite frankly, I looked at this statement as self-evident in the wake of an economic catastrophe where greed was a defining element.  Yet, a remarkable number of people commented in defense of greed; they seem to believe greed is a good thing. So, [...]

Jesse of Jesse’s Café Américain posted on the important subject of deregulation in his last post, “Why the Austrian, Keynesian, Marxist, Monetarist, and Neo-Liberal Economists Are All Wrong.” In it, he opined that it is entirely wrong-headed to assume everything will be alright if we just let free markets work their magic. I want to [...]

At first glance, a flair-up in the Caucasus region seems to have little meaning for Americans. But just as the collapse of the subprime mortgage market ultimately came to symbolize the beginning of the end of an American credit system run amok, so too does the Russo-Georgian conflict illustrate the limits of American military power and its capacity to exert itself anywhere in the world unilaterally. Neither economic, nor military “unipolarity” seems to work any longer. We have, in the words of Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich, a “crisis of profligacy”, in which US foreign policy parallels its domestic dysfunction, because of the refusal of Americans to recognize that they have to pay a significant price for economic abundance at home and geopolitical dominance abroad. In this world the Bush administration unveiled “a breathtakingly ambitious project of near global domination,” writes Bacevich. Preserving American abundance was the watchword, “yet that way of life, based for at least two generations on an ethic of self-gratification and excess, drastically reduced the resources available for such an all-encompassing imperial enterprise,” he writes. No wonder things have not gone well.

UPDATE 16 Mar 2009: In light of the recent revelations at AIG (see posts here and here), I am re-posting this early post from last March. It is looking a lot more like this is the correct interpretation of events.