The most cruel thing anyone could do to Annie Leonard would be to teach her basic economics. Then she would have to live with the shame of having fabricated that nonsense for the rest of her life. I think I’m gonna hire a guy who just follows her around, shouting the first chapter of Basic Economics at her over and over again.
Tell me no one else thought of this as they read that…
I was reading the Callahan and Garrison one and came across this strange part:
I checked this out here:
And that assertion seems to be completely false. There wasn’t a time when fed funds or discount went from 5.5 to 4 until after the crash. Am I missing something here?
This is something that might actually reach everyday neo-cons and progressives…
(yes, it’s extremely obvious the guy is telling the truth and actually is an accountant, but still…
The only problem is he doesn’t bring up how the shortfall cannot be recouped by “soaking the rich.” So you might include this one as a companion video:
Rural kids, parents angry about Labor Dept. rule banning farm chores
Hah! They finally realized they had that loophole left and they decided to make lives for those families even worse. Come on now. Seriously?
In fact, I have gone to buy raw milk from PA before and the family from which we buy has one of their kids helping them carry the stuff. I am assuming that they will then have to either directly hire a new worker or drawn time from other workers to do this job and then hire a different worker to compensate for the lost productivity.
Sad that they think they’re helping the families and children.
Are the Fed’s only mechanisms for influencing monetary policy the discount window and purchasing government assets from banks? Or are those just its main ones (meaning there are ancillary measures)? The dot-com bubble kind of has me stumped because the discount window rates were pretty well camped out from 5-6% throughout the late 90’s. Is M2 a pretty good way to gauge the Fed’s asset purchasing?
TSA defends pat-down of 4-year-old at Kan. airport
My goodness. It would be so much better if security were left to the free market. Just wow.
I am not kidding.
If you look at the link you gave me, then you have the date as first column, the fund target rates 2nd and 3rd and the actual fund rate is the 5th column. Now if you compare the target rate with the actual rate then there is the interesting bit that although the target rates were consecutively raised from the end of 1998 all the way to the end of 2000, the actual fund rate stopped increasing on 17th of December 1999 and even fell under 5%! This only can happen if the FED at this time didn’t really target their target. Also the FEDs funds rate was already as low as 3% in the early 90s.
The only thing that confuses me is that they write “below 4 percent” in the paper, which I would interpret as “3.something”, although it was just under 5%. Maybe this was a typing error.. This still is over half a percentage point off their target, which is quite a lot for my taste.
The second point is regarding the actual level of the discount/fund rate. I hope it is ok to address this here although you asked me separately about this.
You said:
First it is not about the discount rate, the more important rate is the FEDs Fund rate. And the fund rate of 5% only seems high from the point of view of today. If you compare it to the 80s it appears to be quite low. Also as already said above the FEDs target was in the early 90s already as low as 3%. The problem really is that it is quite hard to find out if the FEDs fund rate is too low or not. It can be even too low at 10%, or theoretically it is even possible that it is too high at 1%. Of course the possibility that it is too high decreases the lower it is, but why Austrians generally assume that the FEDs fund rate is kept too low by the FED comes from the understanding of how the FED actual works and to what their actual leading figures are committed to, which generally is to be openly biased towards “low” interest rates.
I know this is of course quite unsatisfying if you want to try to convince someone else that the FED kept rates too low in the 90s, since this notion doesn’t really come out of empirical but rather from theoretical conclusions, which means that the person you want to convince already has to agree on the theory with you… Only if the rate is at approx. 1% or lower people will quite surely generally accept the claim that the FEDs fund rate is (too) low.
@JJ. I could only get a minute into. Once i saw Obama come out and read some of the comments (pro-Obama) i left. I go on the internet to escape from that.
The Story of being an ignorant eugenicist twat who is complicit in causing the misery of millions?
RE: Obama slow jam video
What a ******* circus.
Thought you guys could use a good laugh. From the comments:
This has likely been posted before, but I’d like to post it again:
Notice how they laugh, laugh at Schiff!
Thought you guys could use a good laugh. From the comments:
No, the gov. would have caged her for trying to live off-the-grid.
Yeah that one! It’s a sad story …
I can’t believe the awful treatment of F4M in this thread and the ignorance of those who treat him like crap. Have you never heard of Henry David Thoreau? Or the Earthship projects that governments tried to stop at every turn because, yes, they would be able to live completely self sustained?
Strange opinion, Porco Rosso. You see, Thoreau did not despise civilization and call for everyone to become a hunter-gatherer. I’ll even quote from wikipedia for you:
So, what was this about ignorance?