Monthly Archives: January 2023

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

Political Observations 2023 01 09

When the parties are this closely divided, small, sometimes extreme elements can exercise far more power than their numbers would justify.  The solution is either to win with larger margins to relegate extreme minorities to the sidelines or to secure strong party leadership that can control errant minorities.  The latter, at the moment, is like putting the toothpaste back in the tube.  We apparently are one of the few countries where the political parties exercise no control over who runs under the party label.

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Economic Thoughts 2023 01 08

Firewalls serve to restrain complex and tightly coupled systems; small recessions are preferable to systemic failures.  The political wish to avoid recessions by neutering small corrections only paves the way for greater failures.

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Seduced by Numbers

“Science cannot tell us how to value things,” Ms. Thompson says. “The idea of ‘following the science’ is meaningless.”

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Bagehot and the Fed

“The Federal Reserve and other central banks have done the opposite. They take any form of collateral and charge little to no interest, thus prolonging the presence of bloated and ill-managed enterprises, denying savers the benefits of prudence, destroying productivity, and burdening public balance sheets with the debts of functionally dead organizations.”

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