The resignation a week ago of Jurgen Stark, Germany’s representative on the European Central Bank’s executive board, was due to a failure by the ECB to follow the German concept of Ordnungspolitik. In the German view, Ordnungspolitik – which may roughly be translated as the politics of order – demanded that Greece be treated harshly […]

The Census Bureau’s study of American incomes, poverty and health coverage issued last week was most interesting when considered, not as a metric of this recession, but as a long-term picture of where American living standards are going. If median incomes are back to 1996 levels in real terms, then the stagnation which followed the […]

As the Great Recession drags on, politicians assure us that “Prosperity is just around the corner” in Herbert Hoover’s unfortunate words, if we only follow their favored nostrums, usually involving spending more public money. However experience of the 1930s combines with the wisdom of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s “This time it’s different” to suggest […]

President Obama delivered to House Speaker John Boehner this week a list of just seven regulations Federal agencies proposed to impose, each of which would cost over $1 billion and the total cost of which would be $109 billion. If you contemplate the latter number, you will come to realize why U.S. economic growth is […]