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...news for Rand's legacy. Her fierce denunciations of government regulation have sent sales of her two best-known novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, soaring. Yet her me-first brand of capitalism has been excoriated for fomenting the recent financial crisis. And her most famous former acolyte--onetime Fed chairman Alan Greenspan--has been blamed for inflating the housing bubble by refusing to intervene in the market...
Global warming has had a real impact on economic development. There are farmers who can no longer till the land that fed their parents and grandparents because it's become almost desert. With changing rain patterns, we have a serious problem of food production. Diseases are moving faster and farther. This is all on account of climate change...
Washington's reading seems to be that we're not subsidizing housing enough. Congress, the Bush and Obama administrations and the Fed have been piling on new aid. For now, they may be correct to do so. With the banking system still shaky, further big declines in house prices could bring disaster. Slowing a price collapse is a reasonable aim of government policy. But as we dig out of this mess, we ought to ask whether the vast infrastructure of government support for homeownership that has been built up since the 1930s is really such a wise policy...
...inability of the Fed to raise rates along with the rest of the world is more bad news for the flagging dollar, and investors everywhere should pay attention. It now makes more sense to get out of the greenback and park money in higher-yielding currencies, since foreign-currency deposits will earn more in interest and could make additional foreign-exchange gains. Interest rates in Australia last week were raised a quarter point to 3.25%, and could go higher still. The unemployment rate Down Under recently fell to 5.7%, leading economists to expect another rate rise on Nov. 3. Meanwhile...
...years into the Great Recession, it's time to face the truth: optimism feels good, really good, but it turns out to be the methamphetamine of run-amok American capitalism. Meth induces a "Superman syndrome." Optimism fed into what Steve Eisman, a banking analyst who foresaw the crash, calls "hedge-fund disease," characterized by "megalomania, plus narcissism, plus solipsism" and the belief that "to think something is to make it happen." The meth-head loses his teeth and his mind; the madcap optimists of Wall Street lost something like $10 trillion worth of pension funds, life savings and retirement accounts...