David Brady of Stanford University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about American public opinion on changing the health care system.

More: 
Brady on Health Care Reform, Public Opinion, and Party Politics

From Felix Salmon at Reuters: Fed official: rates to be kept low past upturn (ht Anthony) Financial markets have not fully understood that the U.S. Federal Reserve’s pledge to keep interest rates exceptionally low for an extended period means they will stay low beyond when officials normally would raise them, a top Fed official said on Friday. “I don’t think markets have really digested what that means,” St Louis Fed President James Bullard said in an interview

More: 
Fed’s Bullard: Rates to Stay Low Longer than Market Expects

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona Well, euphoria in Germany is certainly on the rebound, with a sudden surge in the ZEW investor confidence index and newspaper articles all over the place predicting the imminent renaissance of European economic growth, despite the fact that in 3 of the 5 big European economies – the UK, Italy and Spain – there is little in the way of evidence to back this view up. The French economy is certainly holding up reasonably well, but the situation in Germany still remains deeply problematic due to the complete dependence of the economy on exports. Despite this we have a shower of articles (Below I present an extract from Frank Atkins writing in the Financial Times ) explaining how “Europe’s Economic Recovery is Gaining Steam” and the “German economic recovery powers ahead”

See the original post here:
Is Germany’s Economy Really Powering Ahead?

A 1982 article, The Impossibility of anarcho-capitalism , was recently called to my attention. In it, the author, one Tony Hollick, argues that the “components” of anarcho-capitalism are: A belief that a fully-fledged free-market private property based social order can be realised and maintained without the existence of a single, finally arbitrary system of lawmaking and enforcement which asserts jurisdiction over non-consenting parties. A preference for the imagined advantages of that social order however conceived

Read the original post:
The Irrelevance of the Impossibility of Anarcho-Libertarianism

From the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA): Delinquencies Continue to Climb, Foreclosures Flat in Latest MBA National Delinquency Survey The delinquency rate for mortgage loans on one-to-four-unit residential properties rose to a seasonally adjusted rate of 9.24 percent of all loans outstanding as of the end of the second quarter of 2009, up 12 basis points from the first quarter of 2009, and up 283 basis points from one year ago, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) National Delinquency Survey. … The delinquency rate breaks the record set last quarter.

More:
MBA: Record 13.2 Percent of Mortgage Loans in Foreclosure or Delinquent in Q2

By Edward Hugh: Barcelona Amidst a huge fanfare of euphoria from the press, Japan’s GDP expanded by 0.9% quarter on quarter between April and June, or at a 3.7% annualized rate. In doing so it clocked up the first positive growth in five quarters. Many now claim the worst is over is over for Japan, and in terms of the depth of contraction it may well be, but I fear that recovery may be a much more distant prospect than some imagine, and even when it does come may be far more tepid than is being factored in by the consensus.

View original post here:
Japan Emerges From Recession, But The Slump Continues

The Wall Street Journal reports that a member of the Pigou Club is running for the Republican nomination for Governor of California: California’s fiscal crisis is giving Tom Campbell, an ex-congressman with few resources, a fighting chance to become the state’s next governor….Democrats scorn his ideas for permanent cuts to welfare and social services in lieu of one-time fixes, while Republicans strongly oppose his proposal for a steep increase in the state’s gasoline tax.. ..Armed with a University of Chicago doctorate in economics and a Harvard Law School degree, he represented Silicon Valley for five terms in the U.S

Original post:
Pigou Club News

From the Fed: The July 2009 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices The July 2009 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices addressed changes in the supply of, and demand for, loans to businesses and households over the past three months. The survey also included two sets of special questions: The first set asked banks to rank the causes of declines this year in commercial and industrial (C&I) lending, and the second set asked banks about their expectations for lending standards going forward relative to the average level over the past decade. The results reported here are based on responses from 55 domestic banks and 23 U.S.

See the rest here: 
Fed: Lending Standards Tighten, Loan Demand Weakens

Christopher Hitchens talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about George Orwell. Drawing on his book Why Orwell Matters, Hitchens talks about Orwell’s opposition to imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism, his moral courage, and his devotion to language. Along the way, Hitchens makes the case for why Orwell matters.

Here is the original post: 
Hitchens on Orwell

From the WSJ: Failed Banks Weighing on FDIC For the 102 banks that have collapsed in the past two years, the FDIC’s estimated cost averaged 34%. That is sharply higher than the 24% rate between 1989 and 1995, when 747 financial institutions were closed by regulators … At three of the five banks that failed Friday, increasing the total to 77 so far this year, the financial hit to the agency’s deposit-insurance fund is expected by the FDIC to be about 50% of their assets.

See original here:
WSJ: Loss Rates for FDIC higher than during S&L Crisis

Jim Dwyer at the NY Times brings us the tale of WaMu pushing for foreclosure, even though the owner of the small multi-tenant building kept trying to pay in full after missing two payments in May and June 2008: Banks Help Small Debt Become a Big One (ht Edward) Here is the order vacating the default from Judge Emily Jane Goodman: “The facts in this case, in their simplicity, illustrate the state or property foreclosures in New York and the economic relationship and their borrowers, as well as the surrounding ironies.” An interesting read.

Original post: 
Judge: WaMu’s actions in Pushing for Foreclosure suggest "Bad Faith"

Here is Richard Thaler on the public option in the healthcare debate. He ends up about where I was in June when I wrote on this topic, but I think he is a bit too quick to “assume that the public option does have to break even and can’t make any special deals.” I believe that many advocates and many opponents of the public option are making the opposite assumption and, as a result, see the public option as a route toward a single-payer system. (They disagree, however, about whether that is good or bad.) That implicit assumption is why the public option is a bigger issue in this debate than Thaler would have us believe

Read more: 
Thaler on the Public Option

From the FDIC : MidFirst Bank, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Assumes All of the Deposits of Union Bank, National Association, Gilbert, Arizona Union Bank, National Association, Gilbert, Arizona, was closed today by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as receiver. ..

Read the original here: 
Bank Failures #75 – #77: Union Bank, National Association, Gilbert, AZ, Community Bank of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, Community Bank of Arizona, Phoenix, A

NOTE: This bank was on the Problem Bank List (Unofficial) released earlier. The bank had received a ” PROMPT CORRECTIVE ACTION DIRECTIVE ” on May 5th, and that is basically a “Hail Mary pass.” – usually means failure. Dwelling House= Flop House Bureaucrats to clean up mess We are new slum lords by Soylent Green is People From the FDIC : PNC Bank, National Association, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Assumes All of the Deposits of Dwelling House Savings and Loan Association, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Dwelling House Savings and Loan Association, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was closed today by the Office of Thrift Supervision, which appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as receiver.

Here is the original: 
Bank Failure #73: Dwelling House Savings and Loan Association, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Yesterday I posted some data from Campbell Communications ( National Data: Distressed Sales and Types of Buyers ) Here is a repeat of the graph by buyer type: According to the Campbell survey first-time buyers accounted for 43% of sales in Q2 (investors another 29%). Source: Summary Report–Real Estate Agents Report on Home Purchases and Mortgages , Campbell Communications, June 2009 (excerpted with permission) These numbers are higher than the numbers reported by NAR for Q2: “An NAR practitioner survey in June showed first-time buyers accounted for 29 percent of transactions, unchanged from May …” However I believe the Campbell numbers are closer to actual.

Here is the original post:
First-time Home Buyer Frenzy

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona The non-biblical concept of original sin, as Claus Vistesen notes in this post , when propounded in its standard Obstfeld & Krugman textbook version refers to the situation where many developing economies who are not able to borrow in their own currencies feel forced to denominate large parts of their sovereign and private sector debt in non-domestic currencies in order to attract capital from foreign investors – as evidenced most recently in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Continued here:
From Original Sin To The Eternal Triangle – Lessons From Central Europe

In early April, a Homeowner Protection Act was signed into law in Illinois that delayed foreclosures for a short period. Foreclosure filings plummeted for a couple of months, but filings are now increasing again. From the Chicago Tribune: Foreclosure actions delayed in spring move into system in summer Initial notices of default, the first legal step in the foreclosure process, dropped substantially in the six-county Chicago area during the past three months, largely because of a 70 percent drop in filings over a 30-day period begun in early April, according to a midyear report from Chicago-based think tank Woodstock Institute

Original post: 
Illinois Foreclosures: Increasing Again, Impacting ‘more-affluent areas’

Someone asked me the proper way to view deposit contracts, in the context of a discussion about fractional-reserve banking (FRB). He noted that in my A Libertarian Theory of Contract I state that contractual obligations can either be “to do” or “to give”; and that “to do” contracts are generally not enforceable due to specific performance, but can only result in damages if non performance actually occurs. This implies that the only real enforceable obligations are “to give” something.

Here is the original:
Fractional-Reserve Banking, Contracts of Deposit, and the Title-Transfer Theory of Contract

Albert Jay Nock believed Gresham’s Law operated in ideas as surely as in economics, with error displacing reason from men’s minds as inexorably as bad money drives good money from men’s markets. Nock’s theory seems fast on the way to proof a posteriori, especially in our colleges and universities and particularly in the teaching and textbooks of the “new economics.” The “new economics” — as propounded by Professors Samuelson, Tarshis, Bowman and Bach in these textbooks used in hundreds of America’s best-known colleges and universities — is nothing more than Keynesianism, which, in turn, has many points of similarity to Marxism and the theories of that hyperinflationist, John Law

See original here: 
Economics of Oblivion

From HotelNewsNow.com: HIP increases by 1.6 in July; first sign of turning point This morning, economic research firm e-forecasting.com, in conjunction with Smith Travel Research, announced that after 19 months of consecutive decline, HIP climbed 1.6 percent in July. HIP, the Hotel Industry’s Pulse index, is a composite indicator that gauges business activity in the US hotel industry in real-time. The latest increase brought the index to a reading of 82.2.

See more here:
Hotel Industry Pulse Index Shows Slight Improvement in July

Eric Hanushek of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the current state of education and education policy.

Read the rest here: 
Hanushek on Test-based Accountability, Federal Funding, and School Finance

The issue of private property rights in the EM spectrum (airwaves) arises occasionally. To my knowledge there is not much systematic work on this topic; the David Kelley & Roger Donway ‘s 1985 monograph Laissez Parler: Freedom in the Electronic Media remains the best work on this, to my knowledge. (And, depressingly, almost every new libertarian discussion about this seems ignorant of this work; young libertarians seem ever-determined to re-invent the wheel and/or weigh in before they’ve done their homework.) One Silas Barta keeps claiming that those who support property rights in airwaves cannot object to property rights in IP (see here , here , here , here , and here ).

Read the original here:
Why Airwaves (Electromagnetic Spectra) Are (Arguably) Property

It’s hard to know whether to be outraged or yawn at the revelations that Henry Paulson with Bush’s Treasury talked constantly on the phone with the head of Goldman Sachs, probably in violation of eveyr ethics rule on the books, during those bailout days. These rules are made to somehow clean up government and establish a ridiculously naive ideal that government can and must be constantly impartial in the pursuit of scientific public policy. Anyone schooled by the Nock-Rothbard perspective finds that point of view laughable, and revelations of the sort now reported by the New York Times to be commonplace.

Go here to read the rest:
It turns out that Government Worked Directly With Goldman

Interesting how 6400 videos of political clips can be pulled –by force of law–by youtube and people stand around grumbling but essentially granting the rights of youtube to pull the material and the rights of C-Span and others to insist that it be pulled. In fact, this is the suppression of ideas and free speech through brute force, no different from any other censorship in the history of the history, but it is cleverly disguised in the form of this invention and modern myth born of legal positivism called “intellectual property,” a notion that is utterly foreign to actual property rights and actually attacks property rights..

The rest is here: 
Censorship, thy name is copyright

From the Institute for Supply Management: July 2009 Non-Manufacturing ISM Report On Business® Economic activity in the non-manufacturing sector contracted in July, say the nation’s purchasing and supply executives in the latest Non-Manufacturing ISM Report On Business®. The NMI (Non-Manufacturing Index) registered 46.4 percent in July, 0.6 percentage point lower than the 47 percent registered in June, indicating contraction in the non-manufacturing sector for the 10th consecutive month, at a slightly faster rate . The Non-Manufacturing Business Activity Index decreased 3.7 percentage points to 46.1 percent.

Original post: 
ISM Non-Manufacturing Index Shows Contraction in July