Did the Recession Ever Really Go Away?

Mises Daily: by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Housing prices hitting 2002 levels, unemployment still at 9 percent, private-sector job growth flat, and retail sales still struggling: these are headlines that few expected three years ago. The prevailing theory in Washington was that the recession was somehow precipitated (and therefore vaguely caused) by the crash in housing prices, and many big and small tricks were used to goose the market. But the price system has once again proven to be the greatest and most persistent practitioner of civil disobedience on the planet. That water just won't flow uphill.
All the stimulus programs (trillions of dollars!), the money creation, the buyouts of bad debt, the bailouts, the nationalizations, the ghastly spending, the new regulations: nothing has worked to bring back the shining city on a hill.

The IMF and Moral Hazard

Mises Daily: by Philipp Bagus and David Howden

[Deep Freeze, chapter 3 (2011)]

The late 1990s saw a strengthening of the International Monetary Fund's core mandate as a global financial parent on the lookout for perceived instabilities to correct in the name of economic development. Several alterations in the scope of its operations following the crises of the previous 20 years had given the Fund a far wider range of policy options, as well as far greater resources, with which to support faltering economies.
The crises of the late 1980s and '90s — the Mexican peso crisis, the Russian debt default, the Asian crisis, the Brazilian currency crisis, and the Argentine crisis, among others — all were used to strengthen the Fund's core operating mandate, which is to stabilize exchange rates in order to facilitate global trade. The IMF's failures to immediately stabilize previous crises were reckoned to have been due to a lack of procedural guidelines allowing it to speedily aid the ailing economies. Each time a shortcoming appeared following the IMF's rush to maintain global financial stability, it was assumed that the existing scope of operations was inadequate, not that there was something fundamentally wrong with the very existence of these operations.
In some ways, Iceland's financial crisis could be recorded in the history books as much like the crises in Mexico, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, or any number of Asian nations. However, it differs in two major ways. First, the extent of its boom and subsequent collapse is much greater than anything experienced in the aforementioned developing countries. More important, and more puzzling, is the fact that Iceland is the first developed country to suffer a financial calamity of this scope since the Great Depression.

Up with Vietnamese Catfish

Mises Daily: Monday, June 06, 2011 by Jeffrey A. Tucker

If you are looking for an archetype of disgusting protectionism — benefiting special interests, pillaging consumers, and impoverishing foreigners — the case of the catfish gets my vote.
After communism vanished in Vietnam in the 1990s, entrepreneurs started exporting its catfish. The stuff was so good that it threatened US producers. So in 2003, Congress legislated against the imported fish. It can't be called catfish; it must be called swai and basa. Also, a pricey tariff applies.
Then the US catfish industry started spreading Stalinesque propaganda about the evils of Vietnamese fish. It is nasty, dirty, and disease ridden. As an appeal to goofy American sentimentalism, they claimed that the industry was violating fishes' rights by putting them in too-small tanks. They even claimed that Vietnamese fish puts the United States at risk of "bioterrorism."

Interventionism | Walter Block

The Fundamental Difference between Fairs and Markets

Mises Daily: Tuesday, June 07, 2011 by A.R.J. Turgot

[Excerpted from chapter 4 in part 1 of the The Turgot Collection (2011). Originally written in 1757.]

Flemish Fair by Pieter Brueghel the Younger

The word fair, which is derived from forum, a public square, was originally synonymous with that of market, and is still so in certain respects. Both signify a gathering of sellers and buyers at a set time and place, but the word fair seems to present the idea of a more numerous, more solemn, and consequently, less common gathering. The use of these two words in ordinary language appears to be determined by this distinction, which is immediately perceptible, but which itself arises from a less obvious, and, as it were, more radical, difference between these two things. This will be developed further.

THE LIBERTARIAN

Tuesday, June 7, 2011