Ben Bernanke and the Fed have vowed to battle deflation as if it were the plague; after all, there was deflation during the Great Depression, of which Bernanke is a student, and there was both deflation and low growth in Japan for all of the nineties and off and on during the last decade.
The Vermont Clean Energy Development Fund, of which I'm a board member, is meeting next week to approve the allocation of reservations for the last helping of Vermont Business Solar Tax Credit money available; when this money is gone, it doesn't look like there'll be any more. Nationwide, most bu More...
It's the lack of exits that's a problem amid the deadly clamp of panic throughout the economy - a far cry from the irrational exuberance that drives entrepreneurs (and their investors) and which brings us trouble and fraud as well as greatness and "slumdog millionaires".
No matter how mu More...
"Thanks but no thanks" is Fred Wilson's prompt response to Tom Friedman's column suggesting that $20 billion in bailout funds be More...
Dow at five-and-a-half year low! That's the 4PM headline which inspired this post. Actually, of course, that's no reason for general panic in itself. No one ever said the Dow was supposed to go straight up. However, if you put a substantial part of your "savings" into stocks directly or indirectl More...
Democrats want Federal bankruptcy judges to have the authority to reduce the balances outstanding and/or rates on residential first mortgages in the same way that these judges can already reduce outstanding payments and balances on almost all other forms of debt; Republicans are opposing the legi More...
It doesn't scale. We can't all buy locally and sell globally. The less politically correct sounding version is "beggar thy neighbor".
Last week when we were vacationing in very friendly Apalachicola, I was mildly offended by a banner one block off the tourist street advising everyone to b More...
Torrents of cash gush destructively through the underground economy. Liquidity is never a problem there, just violence. Piles of money are diverted from the real economy to fight the failed war on drugs. Our neighbors to the south are getting tired of paying a bloody price for our drug efforts. O More...
From the POV of longleaf pines, oak trees are weeds – vicious competitors. Original stands of longleaf pine have charred bark from the many fires they've survived and there are no mature oaks among the pine. Seems that the oaks burn up in the periodic blazes which pine forests are particularly pr More...
We have too many financial institutions and too many people working in the financial trades. "Saving" banks is an even worse idea than saving car manufacturers. "Dusting ourselves off" means taking our losses and moving on; even the losses we incurred in the most recent round of bank bailouts. Su More...
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