The U.S. government and Federal Reserve caused the crisis, and since 2008 their actions have set us up for an even bigger calamity.

Economist Anna Schwartz devoted ten years to gathering and analyzing the data that went into her book with Milton Friedman, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. It was the empirical rigor of that book that reminded economists and central bankers of a truth many of them had forgotten—namely, that excessive growth of…
Read More »

My old friends Jeffrey Rogers Hummel and David R. Henderson continue to argue that the Fed had little or nothing to do with fueling the housing bubble during the first five or six years of the present decade. Their latest article along these lines appears in Forbes. This is the third rendition of their…
Read More »

For nearly a decade, Americans acted as though taking on more debt posed no problem. After all, they owned real estate, and all the experts told them that real-estate prices always go up. The mightiest magnates of finance acted as if they believed this stupid story—I say stupid because the merest child might easily…
Read More »

Following up on his earlier support for federal bailouts for financial institutions, in a new interview in the Financial Times, former Federal Reserve System Chairman Alan Greenspan has stated the following in his backing of bank nationalizations in the U.S.: It may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a…
Read More »