Idealistic, fanatical libertarians—the Mises types, Rothbardian and Randian—like to shout from the rooftop that “inflation is a monetary phenomenon.” But that’s mastery of the obvious. Maybe there are still some five-year-olds out there who imagine inflation to be the fault of merchants raising prices so as to screw their clients and, thus also the fault […]
Read MoreI recall an incident on a trading floor at a firm where I once worked. A young man—let’s call him William—got himself too long on the stock of Barclays as it crashed in concert with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008. William was betting big that Barclays was oversold and that it […]
Read MoreHardly a sector of the American economy is unaffected by the current recession; however, no matter how painful this period is, it provides an opportunity for many institutions to do the kind of restructuring that should have been done before now. And, fewer segments of our society are in greater need of financial restructuring than […]
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