Friday, August 5, 2011

Roundup of Economic News ( Sit down, this is rough)

  • Debt Deal is a Blank Check By: Peter Schiff : By supposedly compromising to raise the debt ceiling, Congress and the President have now paved the way for ever higher levels of federal spending.  ...the deal involves less than $25 billion in immediate cuts!  ...So, as our leaders congratulate themselves for saving the nation, the reality is that they may have just sold it down the river.
  •  Rates of Wrath by Paul Krugman :  The US 10-year bond rate is now down to 2.5%. So much for those bond vigilantes. What this rate is saying is that markets are pricing in terrible economic performance, quite possibly a double dip. And it also says that Washington’s deficit obsession has been utterly, totally wrong-headed.  [emphasis added] Maybe someone should do something?
  •  Time for QE3, and Then Some by Clive Crook : Far from worrying about rising inflation, the Fed and the ECB need to see that the situation is deteriorating to the point where engineering a spell of higher inflation is actually the right goal.
  • What Caused The Deficit? A Reply To Megan McArdle  by Jonathan Chait : McArdle is probably correct that Bush only endorsed the concept of extending Medicare coverage to prescription drugs in order to avoid being outflanked on a popular issue, just as Obama did on middle class tax cuts. ...the U.S. political system makes significant policy change hard, and that raising taxes or reducing spending tends to be unpopular. Status quo bias is enormous.
  • The White House: We Don't Create Jobs by Zeke Miller : Carney listed legislative priorities the president believes will create jobs, including an infrastructure bank, the passage of free trade agreements, and tax cuts.   [ emphasis added]  comment:  didn't this President just try to raise taxes?!
  • The reason the markets are diving by Ezra Klein   :  A dramatic gap has opened between the economy as Washington sees it -- and wants to intervene in it -- and the economy that actually exists. ...we seem to have stabilized into an era of high unemployment, low growth and endless risk. Rather than recovering from the crisis, it is almost as if we have settled into it. And no one quite knows how we’re going to escape.  [ comment Wrong, there are ways out, but nobody currently in power in DC is listening.]
The disease is liberalism and its religious belief in Keynesianism.  The cure is small government and free enterprise.  The government should get out of the way.  There's plenty of capital out there waiting to invest if only the government would stop hindering economic growth.  In fact, liberalism isn't even about economic growth, it is about government growth.

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