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An interesting item about how economists influenced by the teachings of the late JM Keynes are falling out with one another. Here is a quote worth pondering from Henry Hazlitt: “Keynes constantly deplored saving while praising investment, persistently forgetting that the second was impossible without the first.” Page 203, The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt. June 19th, 2011 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Too many of our internet dreams depend on the internet being far less vulnerable to governments than it actually is. – August, commenting on a posting at my place about Bitcoin. I suggest comments about what August says about the internet: here. Bitcoin comments: there. June 13th, 2011 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
I see that my fourth (approximately, I think) cousin John Micklethwait, Editor of the Economist, whom our own Paul Marks disapproves of so severely, is this weekend attending a meeting of the Bilderberg Group. I learned about this list of potentates thanks to a link to it from Guido Fawkes, and I consider it rather significant that such an august media personage as Guido should be positively drawing our attention to this gathering. When the internet got seriously into its stride, and particularly blogging, at or around the year 2000, you would have thought that observation and analysis of the global elite would have exploded. After all, detailed analysis of these persons and their thinkings and their doings was the quintessential Story They Don’t Want Us To Know, in other words, a story that was ready-made for the internet. Yet, actually, very little was said about these persons and their meetings and their secret thinkings aloud, by regular people as opposed to the people who were already fascinated by such things. Oh, I’m sure that the people who had been banging on about the evil Bilderbergers for the previous quarter of a century immediately started publishing vast screeds about these persons on the internet. But, or so it seems to me, very few other people paid such talk very much attention. And so, pretty much, it has continued. Why? Was it because bloggers who dipped their toes into these hitherto forbidden waters were visited by sinister people in sinister raincoats at sinister times of the night? Did those who mentioned the Bilderberg Group on the internet suffer mysteriously fatal road accidents? I can’t speak for others, but the thing that kept me away from talking about Bilderberg meetings and similar things was not the fear of Them, but the desire not to be thought completely mad, by people generally. → Continue reading: Is the globe now ready to start thinking seriously about its elite? June 11th, 2011 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
Newspaper headlines photoed by me today, in London:  For a more considered view of the economic picture, try Detlev Schlichter, who now seems to be the unofficial Samizdata economics correspondent, who has another posting up today, about, ah yes, inflation. But the good news is that not all prices are rising. Photoed by me yesterday, in London:  The original price of this book was £10.99. I guess people now realise that it didn’t have a happy ending. Perhaps the answer is going to be to keep warm by burning books. June 8th, 2011 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
He certainly has an unusual way of looking at IP. This issue is messing with my head. A few weeks ago, I read Tim Sandefur’s lucid take on the matter, and took the view that whatever else can be said about it, it is hard to see how I could make a “natural rights” claim for IP in the same way as some classical liberals can do with physical property. But a few days later, talking to an old friend who is a professional arbitrator, my view swung more favourably to this sort of argument, as presented in favour by the late, great Lysander Spooner. I fear that with IP, this is going to be one of those “I haven’t really made up my mind yet” positions. I suspect I am not alone. June 7th, 2011 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
My favourite bit in the Eagleton piece that Natalie links to below is this:
Does it not occur to Eagleton that perhaps the British universities that all these wicked bankers and financiers attended educated them rather badly? While at university, Britain’s future financial elite were taught to accept a false view of the economic world. Now this elite “plunders” (as in “cuts the government grants of”) its educators. The educators educated the elite. The elite screwed up horribly, and now the educators are getting screwed themselves. The educators are appalled at this terrible ingratitude, this horrible injustice. What have they done to deserve this? I say: quite a lot. You teach financially ruinous ideas. The people you taught them to turn round and ruin you. I say: it serves you right. I say: that’s just about the most perfect punishment there could be for what you have been doing. My only worry is that things are actually not as bad as Eagleton says, and that Britain’s universities are in fact not being punished nearly enough for the financial ruin that they did so much to unleash upon the rest of us. June 7th, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Never mind he is debasing the currency and starting us on the road to runaway inflation, is functionally indistinguishable from Tony Blair and his ‘savage cuts’ are a fiction simply parroted by a mainstream media seeming unable to do simple math… he has ‘Ease and authority’ Well, phew, good to know! I guess we’ll be ok then! – Perry de Havilland commenting on a Telegraph blog article claiming that “Ease and authority make David Cameron hard to beat“ June 3rd, 2011 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
… no, I am not talking about his, er, other talents but rather the clarity of his economic analysis…
Read the whole thing. June 2nd, 2011 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is one of those quotes where you add “read the whole thing”:
That’s Allister Heath, writing in the London giveaway newspaper, City A.M., which he edits. His point being that the journey in question has only just begun. Read the whole thing. The above quote comes at the end. Before that come a few of the facts and the figures. I suppose the optimistic take on all this is that you can’t wrench a graph that is going up onto a downward path, just like that. But how much wrenching is actually going on? May 25th, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
The main problem with having discussions about economics and financial markets is this: People look at these complex phenomena through entirely different prisms; they use vastly dissimilar – even contrasting – narratives as to what has happened, what is going on now, and what is therefore likely to happen in the future. Citing any so-called “facts” – statistical data, or the actions and statements of policymakers – in support of a specific interpretation and forecast is often a futile exercise: The same data point will be interpreted very differently if some other intellectual framework is being applied to it. – The opening paragraph of Detlev Schlichter’s latest commentary on the state of the world, entitled Beyond Repair – This will not have a happy ending. May 21st, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
I had already pencilled in the Rally Against Debt as something I would try to be at, if only because it will be taking place a mere walk away from where I live. An incoming email forwarded to me via the Cobden Centre has made this more likely. The email had this attached:  For me, those speakers are an appealing combination of the known, the known of, and the unknown. How many others will show up, I have absolutely no idea. But, if I can do my tiny little bit to make the turnout that tiny little bit less insignificant, I think that I should. I still promise nothing, but I really will do my best to be there, and then to report back here, hopefully with some photos. May 12th, 2011 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
We are already pretty well aware of the case of people such as George Soros – the man credited with helping remove the UK from the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992 – who make a killing from financial markets, while attacking liberal capitalism. Another example is Warren Buffett, the so-called “Sage of Omaha” who, now in his 80s, is one of the world’s wealthiest men with an enviable track record for making money over the long term by what is said to be a ruthless, yet almost heartbreakingly simple commitment to “value investing”. Over at the Cobden Centre, one of its writers, Detlev Schlichter has an excellent, and measured piece about the Buffett phenomenon. He respects Buffett’s track record (who wouldn’t?), but has this to say:
Here is something by me recently about the Koch brothers, who certainly do support capitalism. And this recently top US banker is probably one of the most hard-core defenders of laissez faire around. A refreshing break from the norm. May 10th, 2011 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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