Financial Markets

"The reason why inflation is bad news is not because of increases in prices as such, but because of the damage inflation inflicts to the wealth-formation process."

So Keynes enables Posner to throw off the shackles of rational choice almost completely.

This is old-fashioned redistribution, to sustain the unsustainable.

That is why it is actually government "solutions" that increase the influence of greedy bastards in society. After all, "greedy bastard" is an excellent description of someone who demands power over others without cost or their willing consent; and falsely blames others to gain it.

The mathematical economists are therefore framing assumptions which are admittedly false or partly false, but which they hope can serve as useful approximations, as they would in physics. The important thing is not to be intimidated by the mathematical trappings.

Central bank's and government's loose monetary and fiscal policies are instrumental in the weakening of the process of real savings formation through the diversion of real savings from wealth generators to non-wealth-generating activities.

"The key thing is that the price of producer goods has to fall faster and farther than consumer goods for the correction process to proceed."

Wall Street — especially since this financial crisis began — has been anything but a bastion of laissez-faire capitalism.

The Fed has essentially created the biggest shipment of currency ever, but the crippled banking system hasn't yet delivered it to our prison camp. When it arrives, it might be handy to have some spare smokes around to trade with.

At no point in his speech did Mr. Dudley raise the possibility that the main source of asset bubbles could be the US central bank itself.