Archive | July, 2012

barclays

The Real Problem with Barclays

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).…
Continue Reading 0
olympics

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…
Continue Reading 0
Africa Partnership Station

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…
Continue Reading 2
banknote

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…
Continue Reading 10