![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/images/quotes_7a.gif)
American • Paul Anka on the ‘Vile’ Ted Kennedy
May 5, 2013
Paul Anka on the ‘Vile’ Ted Kennedy
Jack Cashill
In his spicy, seemingly-unedited new autobiography, My Way, Canadian-born entertainer Paul Anka tells of his many encounters with America’s rich and famous over the course of his eventful 55-year career. He has a good word to say about most of them, gangsters included, but not all. Johnny Carson was a mean drunk. Jerry Lee Lewis was a nasty redneck. Michael Jackson, don’t get him started.
And then, in a class by himself, was Ted Kennedy. Anka shows no interest in politics and little knowledge of the same. He may not have known how he undermined the "Republican War on Women" narrative when he discussed his dinner with Ted, date unspecified.
He, his wife Anne, Frank Sinatra and a few others were at La Grenouille, a high-end French restaurant. "Teddy gets plastered," writes Anka. "He’s a terrible drunk. He was notorious. His dialogue was getting filthier and more obnoxious with gutter talk." Anka gives some examples of "this vile stuff." He was not exaggerating.
He and Anne were sitting on opposite ends of the table. "All of a sudden," he writes, "I see this look on her face." When Anka inquires about what is bothering her, Anne answers, "We go now. Please!" Once outside, he asks what happened. "She’d only say she’d been exposed to things she’d never been exposed to in her life," courtesy, of course, of Senator Kennedy.
On the plus side, Anne survived the encounter
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/201 … nnedy.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sun May 05, 2013 12:58 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
Gold and Silver • KING WORLD NEWS INTERVIEW WITH DR. PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
KING WORLD NEWS INTERVIEW WITH DR. PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldn … berts.html
Statistics: Posted by DIGGER DAN — Sun May 05, 2013 2:01 pm
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
Gold and Silver • Update to the Update: The Attack on Gold — Paul Craig Robert
Update to the Update: The Attack on Gold — Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/04 … g-roberts/
April 16, 2013 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: gold, | Print This Article
Tuesday, April 16. The orchestrated attack on bullion in the paper gold market took the spot prices of gold and silver down on Friday and Monday, but actual physical purchases rose during this period. The sales were of paper claims, not of real metal.
The demand for physical possession of bullion rose so strongly that large wholesalers such as www.tulving.com and large retailers such as Gainesville Coins reported sold out items. Also, dealers raised the premiums above the spot price that is charged for coins. From Friday to Monday the premium on Silver Eagles at the large online retailer, Gainesville Coins, rose from $3.75 to $5.99 above the spot price of silver. The percentage increase in premium was larger than the percentage decline in the silver price. Thus, the price of a silver one Troy ounce coin did not drop despite the drop in the spot price. Today (April 16) the price of a silver eagle purchased with a credit card from retailer Gainesville Coins is $30.36. You would never know that the market had fallen out.
Today (Tuesday, April 16) Tulving reported 29% of its bar and coin bullion categories sold out and had almost no silver coin stock. The premium over spot on new gold eagles was $63.95. At large online retailers the premium was $71. Gainesville Coins has no silver Buffalos and lists shipment of orders to commence when coins are available, estimated to be May 10.
What I am reporting are facts, not a theory. We have just had two days of massive sales of paper claims on bullion, but during these days when the price of gold and silver collapsed under short sales, it was difficult to get your hands on the metal itself. On telephone orders you wait in long queues to place an order and are told that delivery awaits availability.
Listening to the media and to academic economists such as Paul Krugman, you would think no one any longer wants gold and silver. But try getting your hands on some.
The physical bullion market, gold especially, is dominated by Asians. Americans are a minor player. Most Americans still believe in the almighty dollar, but few Asians do. The Chinese tomorrow would dump their two trillion of US dollar-denominated assets and purchase gold, except that the action would drive down the dollar and drive up the gold price. So, unlike the orchestrated attack on gold, China plays a slow hand, using the orchestrated attack on gold to acquire the metal at lower prices.
As I understand it, the open interest or future contracts on COMEX greatly exceed the bullion available for delivery. This is a paper market mainly settled in cash, not by taking delivery. If the contracts had to be settled in bullion instead of cash, the COMEX would fail.
One advantage of growing old is that one gains perspective. I remember when gold was $35 an ounce and silver $1 an ounce. If memory serves, until sometimes in the 1960s, a person could still take a paper dollar to a bank and be given a silver dollar. There were $1 dollar and $5 dollar silver certificates (paper money) that circulated along with Federal Reserve currency. At that time banks did not differentiate. A dollar was a dollar. Silver certificates today have collectors’s value, but the Federal Reserve currency does not.
If memory serves, sometimes after 1966 if a person presented a silver certificate to a Federal Reserve Bank, he received one or five ounces or raw silver in return depending on the denomination of the certificate, which looked like a Federal Reserve note except it said Silver Certificate. I have some of these envelopes of little pieces of silver.
When silver was taken out of US coins in the 1960s and copper was taken out of the US penny in the early 1980s, despite my opposition as Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy, all real constraints on fiat money were removed.
Today we see the Fed protecting its protection of “banks too big to fail” with low interest rates by creating enormous sums of money in order to purchase both Treasury bonds and mortgage backed derivatives.
These Fed purchasers are at the expense of savers and CD and bond purchasers who receive a negative real rate of interest.
Now, to protect its bank rescue policy, the Fed is attempting to drive down the price of bullion, thus depriving Americans of any way of protecting their life savings from the inflation that the Fed’s money printing will ultimately cause.
Save a handful of corrupt banks, screw the American public–that is the Fed’s policy.
Like almost every other American institution, the Fed represents the mega-rich.
Anyone with open eyes can see that it is impossible for the US dollar to maintain its current exchange value and role as world money when its supply is being increased by $1,000 billion per year while the world is ceasing to use the dollar for international payments.
The attack on gold is a desperate attempt to protect the US dollar from the Fed’s policy of quantitative easing. But the attack on bullion has apparently failed. The price was driven down, but the demand for physical possession has hit new highs.
What is it that we really know? What have we learned since the Clinton regime?
We have learned that integrity is rare in the US government, in the justice system, and in the financial sector. Whatever integrity one can find in these arenas wouldn’t amount to one ounce of gold.
Americans live in a rigged system in which propaganda determines the public’s awareness and consciousness. Americans, or most of them, live in the Matrix.
Since the end of WWII, most foreign governments have been in the habit of going along with Washington. Only in the aftermath of Washington’s phony wars based on lies and phony economy based on rigged statistics is the rest of the world beginning to realize that Washington is a destabilizing force.
Chavez, the recently deceased leader of Venezuela made the point most powerfully when he spoke at the UN. Standing at the podium in the General Assembly, he said that “Satan himself stood here yesterday speaking as if he owned the world. You can still smell the sulfur.” He was speaking of George W. Bush, and the entire assembly knew it.
The Russian leader, Putin, speaking of Washington, has declared that we know what comrade wolf is up to.
The Chinese can see the new military bases that stupid Washington is building in the Chinese area of influence.
A country whose currency is being abandoned as the means of international settlement, not only by the BRICS but also by puppet states such as Australia and Japan, has reached the point of absurdity when it tries to eliminate bullion as a refuge against the depreciating dollar.
The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury using their dependent bullion banks, every one of which would be busted if interest rates were not rigged by the Federal Reserve, have used leverage in the paper market to drive down the prices of gold and silver; yet, purchases of physical bullion are outrunning supplies.
What we are witnessing is the failure of a policy of financial corruption.
Integrity is a scarce commodity in the US government. Try to find much of it. Demonstrating a rare example of integrity, Brooksley Born resigned as head of the Federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, because the Federal Reserve chairman, the US Treasury secretary, and the SEC chairman prevented her from during her statutory duty and regulating over the counter derivatives. The three morons who prevented her from doing her duty caused the financial collapse.
Integrity is almost non-existent in the US justice system.
Integrity is totally non-existent in the US financial system. As Michael Hudson has proven, the financialization of the economy has destroyed the economy.
With dollars, and now with Washington’s demand Japanese yen and European euros being printed in profusion, where can people put their money, at least those who still have some?
Can they put it in bonds when the Federal Reserve is monetizing debt at $1,000 billion annually and real interest rates are negative?
Can they put it in stocks that are pumped up by banks speculating with the Fed’s money while retail sales, labor force participation, and consumer incomes fall?
Safety can only be found in gold and silver, traditional, historical money that cannot be inflated.This is why bullion is under attack by Washington.
Readers ask me what they can do to protect themselves and where can they go to make gold and silver purchases.
I am not a registered financial advisor. I do not provide financial advice.
Every person must make their own decision. All I can do is to provide information, which is not guaranteed to be correct.
There are various simple options in contrast with the more demanding options of the professional trader. A person can accumulate gold and silver coins and keep them in a home safe or bury them on the property. A person can purchase shares of the Central Fund of Canada which convey ownership in a company that owns gold and silver bullion in a vault in Canada. A person can put money under management with companies that have a strong component of gold, such as Golden Returns Capital LLC whose gold depository is in the US.
Or you can decide to go with William S. Kaye (wskaye@pacgrp.com) whose depository is in Hong Kong.
There is GoldMoney, a Channel Islands based depository firm with storage vaults in London, Switzerland and Asia, and there is GoldSwitzerland, a Swiss company with its storage vault in Switzerland.
If you want a reading on whether physical gold is being sold or merely paper shorts, subscribe to John Brimelow brimelowgoldjottings@gmail.com
This list is not exhaustive. Protecting wealth can be harder than acquiring wealth. This is especially true for the middle class. The super rich can lose hundreds of millions of dollars and still be rich.
Gold and silver investments are not my speciality. I am an economist. I am aware that the US media is a propaganda organization, not a purveyor of truth. Currently the US is creating 1,000 billion dollars annually, but the demand for dollars is not growing with the supply.
Therefore, the exchange value of the dollar is at risk. A high and rising dollar price of bullion is an indication that the exchange value of the dollar with regard to other currencies is too high.
To protect the dollar from its money printing practice, the Fed has used naked shorts, its bullion bank dependents, and the presstitute media to drive down the gold price in the paper market, essentially an unreal market not inhabited by purchasers of physical metal. If the dollar’s exchange value takes a visible hit, import prices will rise, and the Fed will lose control over interest rates.
Meanwhile the demand for bullion possession rises.
The latest disinformation being put out is that bullion dealers, faced with the collapse of bullion prices, are afraid of the risk of purchasing bullion to sell to the public. They are going out of business and not replenishing their stocks. Gold and silver bullion is not available, because bullion dealers are afraid to stock the metals.
Little doubt that Americans who believe every fairy tale “their” government tells them will believe this one too. But those who don’t will observe the long lines waiting to purchase physical metal, not paper claims, and continue to load up on bullion.
17
Statistics: Posted by DIGGER DAN — Wed Apr 17, 2013 12:49 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
I Was a Rand Paul Fan Before It Was Cool
David Boaz
Sure, everybody’s a Rand Paul fan this morning, from the Heritage Foundation to the Huffington Post. Well, maybe not President Obama, John Brennan, and Harry Reid. And alas my good friends at the Wall Street Journal editorial board. But still, a wide array across the political spectrum. Me, I was a Rand Paul fan back in 2010. Indeed, I blogged this picture from Kentucky’s legendary Fancy Farm picnic:
And a couple of weeks later on “The McLaughlin Group” I noted:
In Kentucky, the Democrats are calling Rand Paul an extremist. Rand Paul is responding by calling his opponent a Democrat. In the end, the voters will be more scared of a Democrat.
But even before that, I’d written up Paul’s Republican primary victory with this graphic illustration:
And I’d pointed out that Washington’s neoconservative establishment – from Dick Cheney to David Frum, Mitch McConnell, and Rick Santorum – had campaigned hard against Paul in the primary, and been soundly repudiated. They ran some nasty ads against Paul, and his Democratic opponent kept up the attack in the fall. And again the voters saw the attacks on “radical” Rand Paul and voted for him.
So anyway, I’m happy today to welcome all the new fans who made #StandWithRand a number one topic on Twitter last night. And let’s hope they all stick around, and keep trying to rein in the president’s authority to incarcerate and even assassinate American citizens on American soil.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Rand Paul and Jim Webb on Congress’s Abdication of Foreign Policy Power
Benjamin H. Friedman
John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA director displayed Congress’s disinterest in checking the president’s runaway security powers. Two months ago, when I wrote an article with the unwieldy title, “Will Obama’s Brennan Pick Shed Some Much Needed Light on Drones?” I wouldn’t have guessed that the answer would be yes; it will bestir Congress to finally force the administration to say clearly that it does not reserve the right to kill Americans at home with drone strikes, insofar as they are not engaged in combat. That statement came only thanks to whomever leaked the Justice Department’s summary memo on the topic, Brennan and Attorney General Eric Holder’s impolitic reluctance to articulate limits on the president’s power to kill Americans by calling them terrorists, and, of course, Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) resulting filibuster. The Senate predictably left Brennan’s other sins against civil liberties mostly unexamined.
Paul’s hard-won “toehold of constitutionality” isn’t much to cheer about, even if we add to the spoils the administration’s vague agreement to be more open about its legal rationale for placing people on kill lists. This minimal defense of civil liberties and congressional privilege is what got Republican senators like Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz, Jr. of Texas, who seem to support unfettered executive discretion to kill in the name of counterterrorism outside the United States, to support the filibuster.
Even that was too much restraint for the neoconservative right. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) read on the Senate floor a Wall Street Journal editorial calling Paul’s effort a stunt meant to “fire up impressionable libertarian kids” and assuring us that those targeted by drones here or abroad will be “enemy combatants.” McCain and the Journal spectacularly miss Paul’s point: the issue is whether the president should make that designation, chucking due process rights, without being checked by another branch of government.
As McCain amigo Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) noted, the Republican caucus’ flirtation with civil libertarianism seems a situational consequence of partisanship. The same goes for Democrats. Were it President McCain doing what Obama is, far more than two Democratic senators (Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Pat Leahy of Vermont) would have voted against Brennan. During his filibuster, Paul asked what happened to the Senator Obama of 2007, who opposed torture and war by executive fiat. Paul suggests that those views were products of Obama’s then circumstance: not being president. Even that may be too generous. As I wrote in a recent book review concerning Obama’s counterterrorism record, “even when he took office, there was ample evidence that his dovish positions would not outlast their political convenience.”
We can hope, I suppose, that Paul’s stance will increase Congress’s willingness to assert its constitutional war powers. Although he did not, as far as I know, propose specific restrictions on the use of military force outside of the United States, Paul did complain that the 2001 Authorization of Military Force against the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks and those that harbored them has become a permanent warrant for almost limitless executive war powers, a kind of escape hatch from the Constitution opened by presidential utterance of the word “terrorist.”
The passage in Paul’s filibuster remarks that Julian Sanchez quoted yesterday is worth relaying more fully:
These are questions that should be discussed in Congress… In fact, we shouldn’t be asking [the president] for drone memos, we should be giving him drone memos. We shouldn’t be asking him how he’s going to run the drone program. We should be telling him how he’s to run the drone program. That is our authority. We’ve abdicated our authority. We don’t do what we are supposed to do. We are supposed to be the checks and balances.
That abdication is the subject of the cover essay (“Congressional Abdication”) in the current National Interest by former Virginia senator Jim Webb. Webb argues that Congress has so thoroughly surrendered its constitutional prerogatives in foreign policy that their existence is unknown to many members. He’s especially upset by Congress’ indifference to the bombing of Libya:
It is not hyperbole to say that the president himself can now bomb a country with which we maintain diplomatic relations, in support of loosely aligned opposition groups that do not represent any coalition that we actually recognize as an alternative. We know he can do it because he already has done it. Few leaders in the legislative branch even asked for a formal debate over this exercise of unilateral presidential power, and in the Senate any legislation pertaining to the issue was prevented from reaching the floor. One can only wonder at what point these leaders or their successors might believe it is their constitutional duty to counter unchecked executive power exercised on behalf of overseas military action. At bottom, what we have witnessed in these instances, as with many others, is a breakdown of our constitutional process.
For reasons I explain elsewhere, I doubt Paul and Webb’s exhortations will move their colleagues to again struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy. I hope I’m wrong—that Congress will rewrite the 2001 Authorization of Military Force in a more restrictive way and generally revise the legal framework for lethal counterterrorism operations to create more transparency and restraint (on this, read Robert Chesney, Steve Vladeck, and Jack Goldsmith, who all write for the Lawfare blog). The chief virtue of doing so is not formal adherence to constitutional structure, but the wisdom inherent in that structure: contested authority creates better policies than the unilateral sort.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Mr. Paul Goes to Washington
Julian Sanchez
As Sen. Rand Paul acknowledged early on in his epic 13-hour speech Wednesday (highlights here), his decision to mount an old-fashioned, talk-till-you-drop filibuster of John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA director didn’t really have much to do with Brennan personally. But neither was it really, at a fundamental level, about the narrow question of whether the president can “drop a Hellfire missile on your cafe experience” as you sit sipping a latte on American soil. If any citizens were realistically worried about that prospect, Attorney General Eric Holder has (somewhat belatedly) answered that question in the negative, prompting Paul to declare victory on that front.
But as Wired’s Spencer Ackerman observes, the spectre of Predators over Starbucks actually served to spotlight the “extraordinary breadth of the legal claims that undergird the boundless, 11-plus-year ‘war on terrorism’ ”—and to frame a much broader and more wide-ranging critique of that “perpetual war,” in which Paul charged that Congress has abdicated its responsibilities to an unaccountable executive branch. In Paul’s view, “we shouldn’t be asking [the president] for drone memos”—documents laying out the legal basis for the CIA’s targeted killing program, which the administration has finally, grudgingly deigned to provide to Congress, though not the American public—”we should be giving him drone memos.” As if to highlight the erosion of statutory checks on the president’s counterterror authority, Sen. Lindsey Graham declared that, after all, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed after 9/11 made no exception for actions “in the United States”—even though Congress had specifically rejected a request to include that phrase in the authorization.
The broadly positive reaction to Paul’s filibuster suggests, to me at least, that many Americans now fall outside the bipartisan Washington consensus that there’s little need for serious congressional scrutiny or debate when it comes to the War on Terror, and are relieved to hear that dissatisfaction echoed on the Senate floor. No longer as terrorized or shell-shocked as we were a decade ago, perhaps we’re becoming less willing to accept assertions that the public has no business knowing how and when the president may authorize secret killings in countries where we are not formally at war. If we want to get really radical, we may eventually begin to suggest there are proper constraints—if not constitutional, then at least moral—even on the killing of human beings who had the poor taste to be born in another country. We might question whether Americans are being well served when Congress spends less time debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act or the FISA Amendments Act than Senator Paul did (literally) standing on principle Wednesday night.
Is it absurd to fear, as some of Paul’s colleagues charged, that the president will begin launching drone strikes on American soil? Probably. But the point is precisely that we live under an administration so unwilling to acknowledge meaningful limits on what they may do in the name of national security that it was an exercise in tooth-pulling just to get a public disavowal of an absurd scenario that the government’s anemic targeted killing “standards,” taken to their logical extreme, would not appear to foreclose. The crucial message we should take from Paul’s marathon oration, then, may be this: If it’s absurd to pose the question that inspired his filibuster, surely it’s far more absurd that we’ve arrived, after a decade of complacency about government secrecy and unfettered executive discretion in the sphere of counterterrorism, at a point where the question would need to be posed.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Rand Paul is filibustering the confirmation of John Brennan right now. Wants clarification on drone strikes on US citizens.
“I will speak until I can no longer speak,” Paul said. “I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”
Click here for more and streaming video of his filibuster.
The post Rand Paul is filibustering the confirmation of John Brennan right now. Wants clarification on drone strikes on US citizens. appeared first on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org.
View full post on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org
Ron Paul weighs in on the sequester – It is complete bovine dung.
The sequester isn’t even a cut. If anything goes wrong economically over the next 12 months the President will blame sequester.
The post Ron Paul weighs in on the sequester – It is complete bovine dung. appeared first on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org.
View full post on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org
American • Macy’s Closes Last Department Store In St. Paul
St. Paul Macy’s closing March 16
Pioneer Press
Posted: 02/28/2013
Macy’s announced shortly after the New Year that the store would close in March. The company in January decided not to renew its lease after it expired at the end of 2012.
Company officials confirmed the March 16 target date on Thursday, fudging somewhat because the store is in the hands of liquidators.
"This could shift slightly by a day or two," a company email said.
Speculation that the store would close had been ongoing for years, amid dwindling sales numbers. Macy’s had been subject to a 10-year loan agreement with the city of St. Paul to keep the store open. That 10-year period ended Dec. 31, 2012.
On Thursday, Feb. 28, store merchandise continued to empty out during a 50- to 70-percent off closeout sale on all merchandise, with the exception of cosmetics and fragrances. Departments have shrunk significantly as items such as clothing, luggage, kitchenware and rugs were cleared out.
In addition to merchandise, Macy’s has also put the store’s display pieces such as mannequins, shelving and artwork on sale.
Macy’s was the last department store in downtown St. Paul; its close marks the first time the city center has been without one for more than 130 years.
Whether it was Schuneman’s, Dayton’s, Marshall Field’s or Macy’s at the time, generations of Katie Dvorak’s family members have a wide variety of memories of the department store.
For the Oakdale resident, she once
shopped there regularly and worked there part-time during the holidays when the store was a Dayton’s location.
"I especially remember the feeling you had at Christmastime — the music, the bells ringing, the decorations, the hustle and bustle of it," Dvorak said. "It’s sad the store’s closing. There’s so much history that comes with it."
http://www.twincities.com/ci_22689734/s … -employees
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Fri Mar 01, 2013 7:04 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
Defending Cato from Paul Krugman’s Inaccurate Assertions
Daniel J. Mitchell
Writing for the New York Times, Paul Krugman has a new column promoting more government spending and additional government regulation. That’s a dog-bites-man revelation and hardly noteworthy, of course, but in this case he takes a swipe at the Cato Institute.
The financial crisis of 2008 and its painful aftermath…were a huge slap in the face for free-market fundamentalists. …analysts at right-wing think tanks like…the Cato Institute…insisted that deregulated financial markets were doing just fine, and dismissed warnings about a housing bubble as liberal whining. Then the nonexistent bubble burst, and the financial system proved dangerously fragile; only huge government bailouts prevented a total collapse.
Upon reading this, my first reaction was a perverse form of admiration. After all, Krugman explicitly advocated for a housing bubble back in 2002, so it takes a lot of chutzpah to attack other people for the consequences of that bubble.
But let’s set that aside and examine the accusation that folks at Cato had a Pollyanna view of monetary and regulatory policy. In other words, did Cato think that “deregulated markets were doing just fine”?
Hardly. If Krugman had bothered to spend even five minutes perusing the Cato website, he would have found hundreds of items by scholars such as Steve Hanke, Gerald O’Driscoll, Bert Ely, and others about misguided government regulatory and monetary policy. He could have perused the remarks of speakers at Cato’s annual monetary conferences. He could have looked at issues of the Cato Journal. Or our biennial Handbooks on Policy.
The tiniest bit of due diligence would have revealed that Cato was not a fan of Federal Reserve policy and we did not think that financial markets were deregulated. Indeed, Cato scholars last decade were relentlessly critical of monetary policy, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Community Reinvestment Act, and other forms of government intervention.
Heck, I imagine that Krugman would have accused Cato of relentless and foolish pessimism had he reviewed our work in 2006 or 2007.
I will confess that Cato people didn’t predict when the bubble would peak and when it would burst. If we had that type of knowledge, we’d all be billionaires. But since Krugman is still generating income by writing columns and doing appearances, I think it’s safe to assume that he didn’t have any special ability to time the market either.
Krugman also implies that Cato is guilty of historical revisionism.
…many on the right have chosen to rewrite history. Back then, they thought things were great, and their only complaint was that the government was getting in the way of even more mortgage lending; now they claim that government policies, somehow dictated by liberals even though the G.O.P. controlled both Congress and the White House, were promoting excessive borrowing and causing all the problems.
I’ve already pointed out that Cato was critical of government intervention before and during the bubble, so we obviously did not want government tilting the playing field in favor of home mortgages.
It’s also worth nothing that Cato has been dogmatically in favor of tax reform that would eliminate preferences for owner-occupied housing. That was our position 20 years ago. That was our position 10 years ago. And it’s our position today.
I also can’t help but comment on Krugman’s assertion that GOP control of government last decade somehow was inconsistent with statist government policy. One obvious example would be the 2004 Bush Administration regulations that dramatically boosted the affordable lending requirements for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which surely played a role in driving the orgy of subprime lending.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The burden of government spending almost doubled during the Bush years, the federal government accumulated more power, and the regulatory state expanded. No wonder economic freedom contracted under Bush after expanding under Clinton.
But I’m digressing. Let’s return to Krugman’s screed. He doesn’t single out Cato, but presumably he has us in mind when he criticizes those who reject Keynesian stimulus theory.
…right-wing economic analysts insisted that deficit spending would destroy jobs, because government borrowing would divert funds that would otherwise have gone into business investment, and also insisted that this borrowing would send interest rates soaring. The right thing, they claimed, was to balance the budget, even in a depressed economy.
Actually, I hope he’s not thinking about us. We argue for a smaller burden of government spending, not a balanced budget. And we haven’t made any assertions about higher interest rates. We instead point out that excessive government spending undermines growth by undermining incentives for productive behavior and misallocating labor and capital.
But we are critics of Keynesianism for reasons I explain in this video. And if you look at current economic performance, it’s certainly difficult to make the argument that Obama’s so-called stimulus was a success.
But Krugman will argue that the government should have squandered even more money. Heck, he even asserted that the 9-11 attacks were a form of stimulus and has argued that it would be pro-growth if we faced the threat of an alien invasion.
In closing, I will agree with Krugman that there’s too much “zombie” economics in Washington. But I’ll let readers decide who’s guilty of mindlessly staggering in the wrong direction.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty