If you’ve been following the news lately then you have probably heard something about Barclays and interest rate fixing. Barclays is a massive banking corporation based in the UK with a large world-wide presence. By ‘interest-fixing’ financial commentators mean Barclay’s lied about the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and the Euro Interbank Offered Rate (EURIBOR).…
Archive | July, 2012
Harry Reid’s Olympic-Sized Fallacy
Senate Majority leader Harry Reid thinks that the U.S. Olympic Team’s uniforms—made in China as they were—deserve to be burned. He reasons that we have an abundance of unemployed textile workers in this country—why shouldn’t we take advantage of them to manufacture the Olympics uniforms? Wouldn’t that put these Americans back to work?
There are…
The Triumph of South Park Economics? (part 2)
As the title indicates, this post is the follow up to a previous post. I recommend reading it before jumping into this one.
Enter Stan Marsh, just trying to return his family’s margarita maker. If there is any redemptive part of “Margaritaville” it is here.
First Stan attempts to return it to the retailer. The…
The Failure of South Park Economics (part 1)
In a previous post, I lauded the economic lessons of South Park’s “Cash for Gold” episode. In this post, I must reverse my praise for the economics in an earlier episode, “Margaritaville.” The episode originally aired in early 2009 amid intense public debates over the global financial crisis.
The episode took on the cornucopia of …
The Economic Kindness of In-Kind Donations
The popular humor website “Cracked.com” recently published a thought provoking article entitled “5 Popular Forms of Charity (That Aren’t Helping).” The five charitable activities mentioned were (1) awareness campaigns, (2) donating clothing, (3) choosing your charity based on its overhead, (4) earmarking donations, (5) volunteering after disasters. The author’s arguments for why each of these…
Banknotes and fractional reserve
Economist Larry White at George Mason University submitted a thought-provoking written testimony the other day. Discussing the issue of fractional reserve banking before the House Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology, he made the following claim:
For payment by account transfer, FRB offers a more economic way of providing payment services. A money warehouse…
-
Reality TV Inventor Loses Big to ‘Buy American’ Fallacy
-
Unlearning Economics
-
MIT Economist, Former IMF Chief Engages Ron Paul on Banking and Makes an Interventionist Mistake
-
The Monopoly Bogeyman
-
How My Naïve Perception of the Economics Profession Eventually Changed
-
Tenets of Economic Faith
-
Economics as Religion: The Paradox of Self-Interest
-
Waging War on Work
-
The Dark Side of Monetary Inflation
-
In Praise of Speculators
-
Chris A: With due respect Nicholas, I think is has zero int...
-
Nicholas Freiling: Chris, What effect do you think economic inter-...
-
-
-
David: Doesn't the Fed increase the money supply by purc...
Twitter
Follow @HansEcon on Twitter