I have just received a copy of a fabulous new book by Australian economist, John Quiggin: Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us (Princeton). I have so far had only an opportunity to dip into parts of the book, but it is proving to be one of the clearest, easy to read (which…
One of of the many factors that bedevils any effort to reform regulation in the United States is an unwaivering belief that private is always better than public. This is a creed and it is certainly superior to many of the alternatives. The problem is that many Americans hold this belief with a fanatical blindness,…
Last week I posted about the massive tax breaks enjoyed by hedge funds managers, among others. This morning David Weidner puts more numbers around this outrageous tax subsidy for some of the richest people on earth: For example, the top 25 highest-paid fund managers made an average of $570 million in 2006. They received a…
For those readers who assume that private enterprise always does things better than government, read this post from insider oil blog (hat tip 14). It is hard to be optimistic about the Gulf oil disaster; indeed, the post is positively chilling. Yet the best the captains of industry can come up with before Congress this…
In efficient markets the mistakes of individual participants are corrected by the aggregate performance of the market as a whole. But when companies become so large that their mistakes spill out into the pubic arena, requiring some kind of public intervention to repair or salvage the situation, the pubic has an interest in reducing the…
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