Ron Paul lucidly speaking on the effect of paper currencies and the Federal Reserve’s interest manipulation on actual wealth.
“This deficit shows that much of our prosperity is based on borrowing rather than a true increase in production”. Couldn’t be stated any clearer.
Randolph Harrison goes into Second Life, expecting to make a quick buck via market arbitrage, and realizes that getting money out of Second Life might not be as easy as getting it in.
Enter the second problem, the L$ exchange markets are effectively rigged. At any given time over the past year or so, the [...]
The index of economic freedom has been released, and Hong Kong is at the top.
The rankings employed criteria such as business freedom, tax rates, inflation, property rights and freedom from corruption.
The United States comes in fourth, after Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia. Looking at the economic freedom map it seems that El Salvador is [...]
Bruce Perens over at Technocrat has started a thread on if George Bush is even competent to be president, based on how out of touch his plans to send even more troops to Iraq make him seem. Smart discussions on the comments, both for and against, including the very important point of intelligence having [...]
Marginal Revolution has a brief analysis by Tyler Cowen of a New York Times article called “A Surprising Secret to a Long Life: Stay in School“. Great discussion about causation versus correlation in the comments. The title, of course, is a joke on that very topic.
From the article:
The one social factor that [...]
A report scheduled to be released by the Treasury Department tomorrow is expected to show the true deficit in the Bush administration’s 2006 federal budget to be an astounding $3.5 trillion in the red, not $248.2 billion as previously reported.
[...]
“The United States is bankrupt,” he insisted. “With less than one-tenth of the actual deficit being [...]
Here’s Steven Levitt, author of the betseller Freakonomics - you can even find that book in Costarrican supermarkets now - talking to the hilarious Stephen Colbert.
Colbert does the confident idiot act so perfectly that it’s almost hard to forget he’s not.
Not a lot of economic insight on that interview, but worth it if just for [...]
Last Friday I was out having lunch with a group of friends. There was a cadre of women in the table next to us (along with an older, pot-bellied guy who looked like an eunuch), discussing quite openly male and female behavior. One of the women kept making the point that infidelity [...]
Last year in Costa Rica inflation was almost 15%, the largest percentage of that due devaluation: a dollar was worth c457.58 when the year started and c495.65 when it ended. There’s an almost 10% drop just because we’re using a currency that allows our central bank to print out new Monopoly bills. Recent [...]
Robert Heinlein once pointed out that with mathematics, history and languages you could understand the universe. Marginal revolution is a blog that features intriguing economics-related posts, helping you keep up to date with at least the first two of items of that curriculum, but all too often they preach to the choir and [...]