recession

Gloomy forecasts are becoming ubiquitous, lending credence to the view that economics is the dismal science.

In the coming weeks, Congress will again debate increasing the debt limit. 

John and Donny continue their weekly exploration of think tanks across the country in episode #50 of the In The Tank Podcast. This weekly podcast features (as always) interviews, debates, and roundtable discussions that explore the work of think tanks across the country. The show is available for download as part of the Heartland Daily Podcast every Friday. Today’s podcast features work from the Goldwater Institue, The Heartland Institute, the Georgia Center for Opportunity, and Reason.

Today we have assembled a panel of independent experts with unique perspectives. We are recording this in late January, and it has already been a dramatic year. After rebounding from a brutal start, the U.S. stock market is still down 5%, while Europe, Japan and China have all declined approximately 8%.

Beginning in 1983 the government changed its method of calculation to show lower inflation by excluding food and energy, claiming they were too volatile to be reliable indicators. The result is the so-called “core inflation” CPI, which is a favorite of the Federal Reserve. The latest figure for this CPI reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is 0.4% (for August and also July), but if calculated by the method used in 1980 the inflation rate would be 7½ percent, as shown by Shadow Government Statistics (ShadowStats.com).

In today’s episode of The Heartland Daily Podcast, managing editor Jesse Hathaway talks with Mercatus Center monetary policy program director and Bentley University economics professor Scott Sumner about the American stock market’s recent up-and-down volatility, the increasing threat of an international economic recession, and how our country’s centralized banking policies make the problem worse.

To best delineate why Net Neutrality is so terribly bad, behold the following video. In which is laid out the worst portions of Net Neutrality – and the Marxist reasons why the Left wants it done.

Pundits largely agree that those who cast ballots last week had more or less one idea in mind – Washington is broken and must be fixed. So imagine the surprise that online customers will receive when Senators Reid and Durbin lead the just voted out Senate to massively expand government power in their last few days at the helm of Congress.

President Obama is trying, according to CNN, to “convince voters of a vigorous recovery that a majority still doubts.” Describing comments the president made on October 2 at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, CNN calls his attempt, the “political problem inherent in having to describe an economic recovery that many Americans still aren’t feeling.”

“Government is the great fiction through which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else,” wrote the celebrated French legislator, economist, and political theorist Frederic Bastiat 165 years ago. With recent reports out of the Census Bureau indicating nearly half of all Americans are receiving some form of direct government subsidy – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment benefits, housing assistance, veterans’ benefits, etc. – can there be any doubt he was right?

Eighty years ago, in the autumn of 1934, there appeared in English one of the most important books on money and inflation penned in the twentieth century, The Theory of Money and Creditby the Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises. Even eight decades later, it still offers the clearest analysis and understanding of booms and busts, inflations and depressions.

A cautionary tale about the pitfalls of bureaucratic incompetence played out in Ireland over the last several days. American country music star Garth Brooks was scheduled to play five concerts in the Croke Park arena, one of the largest venues in the country. In all, 400,000 tickets were sold. That is an astonishing number, considering Ireland’s population is just under 4.6 million. Close to one in ten citizens was planning to attend!

According to the Commerce Department, the economy based on its Gross domestic product–the value of its goods and services–fell at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 2.9% in the first quarter of this year. That was the largest recorded drop since the end of World War II in 1945!