A few months back many economists were screaming that all the money the Fed was creating via the old printing press would generate a huge burst of highly destructive inflation. It hasn’t — at least not yet. And by considering why this might be, you get a pretty good idea about the idiocy, and indeed the cruelness, of the whole crisis management effort promulgated in Washington. One easy way to understand why inflation isn’t raging in this country is to imagine a garden hose attached...

Here’s a headline in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer: “Stimulus funds finally flowing to weatherization.” It’s the kind of headline that makes one first blink, then dumbly nod, then wonder: What were these guys thinking? This money, along with $700 billion-plus other money, comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed nine months ago. Among this Act’s two main aims were boosting employment and making this country more energy independent. And when...

Today’s New York Times featured two columns about Tim Geithner. The one by Paul Krugman panned him for his role in the A.I.G. bailout. The one by David Brooks praised him for his efforts saving the financial system. Both columns keyed off his testimony yesterday before a House panel. I saw clips of that encounter and got some pretty clear insights about the way our Treasury Secretary thinks. They convinced me the man must go. What made this so obvious was Geithner’s response to a query...

In 1992 Bill Clinton’s campaign was built around the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid.” That’s what voters cared about. Bush One’s failure in that realm was what got Clinton elected. In 1993 the newly elected President Clinton came into office and focused on health care reform. His efforts there flopped, and the rest of his presidency pretty much flopped as well. Which brings us to 2008. Candidate Obama largely got elected on Bush Two’s economic bungling....

In a world where shoppers for anything costing more than $10 expect to see a for sale sign, a world where workouts and restructurings that dramatically change the amount debtors ultimately pay creditors in the marketplace, a world where even the most predatory credit card issuing banks are usually willing to negotiate down outstanding debt of individuals to save on litigation costs, Uncle Sam, represented by our negotiator-in-chief Tim Geithner, still contrives to pay the full amounts due people...

Don’t take most of what you read about the economy these days too seriously. If you’re not a Wall Street trader or a still employed economist, it will only make you unhappy and/or furious. Rather, just peruse web sites on the Internet for headlines that are good for a chuckle. Here’s a few I picked off various sites just today. “S&P 500 Claims the 1,100 Mark — Recovering ‘07 Levels.” This was on the MarketWatch site. ‘07 levels, you may recall, were...

If you haven’t read the article in today’s New York Times titled “High Costs Weigh on Troop Debate for Afghan War,” please do so. If all the other reasons for not dramatically expanding our military effort in that land of beaten down invaders has not yet convinced you that a major buildup there would be insane, this one should do the trick. The article points out that even a modest buildup from present levels would wipe out savings from our Iraq withdrawal. A build up of...

The Democrats would seem to have two problems with Senator Joe Lieberman. The immediate one is his threat to put the kibosh on the party’s signature issue, health care, as a matter of conscience. The longer term threat is that Joe will bolt the party and the Dems will lose their 60 vote, veto-proof majority in the Senate. The fact is, however, that the first problem is actually the solution to the second problem. Joe is no longer a Democrat. He lost the party’s primary in Connecticut...

It was ten years ago today that President Bill Clinton, egged on by one of those former Goldman Sachs honchos who gives himself to public service as Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, signed the bill that repealed the Glass-Steagull Act — the measure that separated investment and commercial banking. In the 1930s most everyone realized such a separation was needed to prevent destructive market practices that led to terrible economic consequences. By the 1990s most everyone had forgotten this...

Thinking about the huge and growing chasm between Main Street and Wall Street recently led me to think about a similar chasm in our nation’s history — one that generated enormous populist anger at the end of the 19th century. The issue then in a technical sense involved gold and silver, but came down to whether the government should put more money into circulation in a way that would help the indebted farmers (we were still very much an agiculture-based nation in those days) and cash-strapped...

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner did something the other day that not only perfectly reveals his economic priorities (and those of the Obama Administration), it suggests the still very shaky state of some of our biggest banks. He put the kibosh on a proposal for a so-called “Tobin Tax” — named for the Nobel laureate who originally proposed it — a tax on stock sale transactions. Such a tax is simply another kind of sales tax. Unlike the ones you or I now pay when buying all manner...

Yesterday the Dow rose 203 points on news about employment. A “mere” 512,000 more Americans lost their jobs last week, the 51st consecutive week that weekly job loses exceeded 500,000, This number nonetheless not only beat analyst expectations, it was a bit lower than some previous months job loses. It thus convinced traders that today’s non-farm jobs report for October would show that “only” 150,000 more people were collecting unemployment insurance last month and the...

When it comes to the economy, the people running this Administration’s policies aren’t stupid. No, sir. They’re very smart. Too smart, in fact. That’s their problem — and the reason the Democrats took such a whacking in yesterday’s elections. By virtue of their excessive intelligence, these policy setters have been fixated on “the economy” and not on the economic lives that most Americans (including the independents who abandoned the Dems in droves this...

Should the U.S. Treasury Department be privatized? Should Goldman Sachs get the contract to operate it? Some people might ask why we should bother to formalize what has actually been the case informally for years. After all, the last Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, headed GS before deigning to serve in Washington. And the present occupant of Paulson’s job, Tim Geithner, according to phone logs recently made public, looks to GS almost obsessively when it comes to running his department...

Raised as a Pashtun, he’s that people’s star A local tribal hero hailed near and far He spent some years a’crusin’ down in Kandahar At three was selling carpets in its bustling bazaar Hamid, Hamid Karzai, king of the slick veneer. In the final Cold War’s chapter, the Russkie soldiers came Adding a new chapter to the old Afghan Great Game Hamid joined the CIA, the failing bear to tame And when the smoke had cleared away he’d won himself a name Hamid, Hamid Karzai,...

Too bad about the Obama Administration. It actually seemed to show some promise in its early months. It actually seemed to have a real commitment to change, a desire to see in crises at home and abroad opportunities to strike out in different directions that would lead to a brighter future for Americans and the world generally. But now it’s clear. That ain’t gonna happen. On the domestic front we’ve seen the sad and in many ways incomprehensible continuation of Bush-era economics....

Try to imagine. It’s 20 years ago. It’s 1989 and you come across the following headline, a headline that actually appeared on today’s New York Times website: “China Helps Build Huge Texas Wind Farm.” In 1989 you probably would have laughed, thinking this headline was totally whacky. So whacky that it must really have been picked up from that year’s equivalent of The Onion. But you’re curious about this ridiculous headline so you read the story that goes...

You’ll be seeing many variants of this headline today: “Economy growing, but not jobs.” Like so much of recent economic reporting, it’s deceptive. It suggests a kind of balance between two things of equal weight and importance, one good (economic growth) and one bad (unemployment). Such a deception implies that except for a difficult jobs situation, other key elements of the economy are improving. No. Alas, no. Our overall economy remains very sickly, a jump in quarterly...

In the day or two we”ll likely get an official announcement that the recession has ended. If it comes along as expected, it will be based on readings showing that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose in the recently ended third quarter. Economists, a group where unemployment is currently unknown, will hail the report. So, too, will stock analysts whose expectations are invariably exceeded, along with officials in Washington whose own policies have allowed Wall Street to chalk up record bonuses,...

A lyric from an old Blues song goes, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” There’s a similar disconnect when it comes to the relationship of government to small business. Every government says it wants to help this critically important sector of the U.S. economy. But in countless ways, year by year, most governments continue to make it more difficult for such enterprises to operate profitably. A government supported stock market bubble that has been inflating...

Now it’s time to return to Silverstein Family’s Pledge Cental. Mike Silverstein, how are things going over there? A little slow, Sylvia. And frankly, I’m disappointed. We only ask for financial help from our freinds and neighbors five or six times a year. But the phones are pretty quiet now. Can I interrupt you for a second, Mike? Certainly, Sylvia. As Mike has been saying, we can’t get along without your help. We can’t continue to do the things we do, the things so...

Statistics, the things economists use to justify their professional existences, haven’t always been highly regarded by people who aren’t economists. Mark Twain, for example, once noted that “there are lies, damn lies and statistics,” with the later being the worst lies of all. To test this view, let’s look at the batch of stats that came our way in just today. Leading indicators, a really big one for our economist friends, rose for the sixth straight month, last month...

Americans love movie rereads. The same types of characters in the same types of places doing the same types of things in only slightly different ways. Think Star Wars. Think Matrix. Think the Smokey flicks. We also seem to love political disaster retreads. Think Vietnam. Think Iraq. Think what’s about to happen in Afghanistan. One good way to appreciate the newest addition to the ongoing America’s Empire Goes Down The Toilet saga is thus to view the Afghanistan drama as if it were a...

I vaguely remember a Canadian politician named Pierre Trudeau. He did some important things for his country, I believe, but I can’t be sure because I’m not much on Canadian history. But one thing I do remember quite well about the man was his campaign song. It was called “Pierre Trudeau: The Poor Man’s Friend.” That has always struck me as a great way to be remembered. By your own people, and by history. Known as someone who was a friend to the poor. Someone who cared...

If you drive a car in virtually any city or town in this country you probably think the parking ticket situation couldn’t be worse. Silly you. It’s actually much worse in other parts of the world, and nowhere worse than in the U.K. There are so many god-awful parking tales coming out of the U.K. these days they appear in its media almost as often as local weather reports. Perhaps the worst abuses don’t even involve on-street ticketing by local government minions. They occur off-street...