Don Watkins of the Ayn Rand Institute wrote an article, The Myth of Banking Deregulation, to debunk a lie. The lie is that bank regulation is good. That it helped stabilize the economy in the 1930’s. And that deregulation at the end of the century destabilized the economy and caused the crisis of 2008.
As of early 2015, Dodd-Frank had imposed altogether 27,670 new restrictions, more than all other laws passed under Obama combined (that is really saying something, considering the regulatory frenzy let loose by his administration. Note: the law may have “only” 2,300 pages, but more than 10 different regulatory agencies have been producing administrative laws for six years in a row to put it into practice – and they are not finished yet. Don’t you feel safer already?
If deregulation is the problem, then re-regulation is the solution. So, in the wake of the crisis, Congress enacted a 2,300-page monstrosity of regulation known as Dodd-Frank.
Watkins does a good job describing government regulation of finance, in particular addressing the savings and loan industry. He gives an example where people commonly assume that Congress reduced regulation, the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.
The headline is that this law reduced regulation, and allowed banks to be in the securities business. However, the truth is that it mixed in a dollop of increased regulation.
The economic cost of Dodd-Frank (one guess as to who is going to end up paying for this…). Note: this is not cumulative – the cumulative tally so far is a cost of $36 billion (about $310 per household!); it has so far taken 74.8 million paperwork man hours to create this monster. You will be happy to learn that the law not only makes us perfectly safe, but introduces racial and gender quotas as well. The number of final rules exceeds those generated by Sarbanes-Oxley by a factor of 30 – so far.
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See, if you want to whip inflation now, you don’t need to do any of the really difficult things, such as printing less money… or God forbid, return to honest, market-chosen money (shudder!). All you need is intelligent nutrition! Image credit: Marshall Astor
A trader from the (near) future. Image via tumblr.com
Sadly, the despondency visible in the old man’s facial expression has become a widespread phenomenon since the currency ban, particularly among India’s poor Photo credit: Aayush Goel
Murray Rothbard was convinced that we should return to a sound monetary system based on the market-chosen money commodity gold. Note that the use of gold as money as such cannot keep banks from issuing fiduciary media (a.k.a. uncovered money substitutes). The important thing is therefore that the monetary and banking system are free. A free banking system will develop along sound lines of its own accord, not least because banks have to continually clear transactions between each other and will tend to shun overextended lenders. A free market monetary/ banking system would likely be different from today’s system in numerous aspects, but it would be just as sophisticated and efficient. Most importantly, it would be economically sound and the likelihood that severe business cycles emerge would be vastly lower. Photo via mises.org
Indians are celebrating that their economy has surpassed that of India’s former colonial master, the UK.
The fellows depicted above certainly mesh perfectly with the image of meth-addled cannibals conjured by our imagination… A few interesting questions regarding this event remain unanswered to this day. Did they marinate their meal? Fill it with stuffing? What were their wine and salad choices? Was their dinner roasted on a spit, cooked in a jungle wok the traditional way, or were these pale gourmets connoisseurs of wino tartare?
The assassin and his victim, Andrei Karlov, Russia’s ambassador to Turkey. While making the Travolta-like dance move caught in the photograph above, the assassin shouted “Allahu-akbar! Don’t forget Syria! Don’t forget Aleppo!”. Not a “moderate” rebel we would guess, but rather a sympathizer of assorted head-choppers. The assassination was photographed by several people and most of the pictures look like stills from a Hollywood movie. This gives the incident quite a surreal quality. It is as if it was staged specifically for the the evening news. No unfocused shaky-cam stuff forcing you to squint if you want to see something – these days, we get our daily snuff in high definition! Obviously, modern audiences demand and deserve certain quality standards.
Indian jewelry merchant Photo via indiatimes.com
Gold quotes in India – gold traded for as much as Rs 49,000 per 10 grams or US$ 2,294 per ounce
As 
Famous French hippie and author Voltaire. He wears the same sardonic grin in every painting, whether he’s depicted at a young or an old age, doesn’t matter. His real name was François-Marie Arouet; he adopted the pen name Voltaire (one of 178 different ones he used) after spending 11 months incarcerated in a windowless cell in the Bastille, following the publication of a satirical verse in which he insinuated that the French regent practiced incest with his own daughter. Said regent was the infamous Duc d’Orleans, who shortly thereafter conspired with John Law to utterly ruin the country’s currency and economy in an early central banking experiment. Voltaire’s decision to insult him in advance reveals his excellent foresight and character judgment. The aristocracy was never sure whether it should fear Voltaire for his anti-authoritarian streak, or love him for his wit.
The primacy of the wallet.
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Etatiste tool Kenneth Rogoff, whose authoritarian jeremiads against cash currency we have first discussed and criticized in 2014 in “
