Tackling systemic risk is no job for the status quo by William Donaldson and Arthur Levitt, in the Financial Times.
Short-Selling Bans around the World: Evidence from the 2007-09 Crisis by Alessandro Beber and Marco [...]

Folks, I have bad news for you. The Barack Obama Health Care Reform (shepherded through by Nancy Pelosi) will be, as written, an utter and unmitigated disaster. It attempts to do two things which are, in combination, impossible. First, it makes health insurance much more widely available through the mind-boggling deal it made with the [...]

You will, from time to time, see people ask for more regulation of markets. I don’t really need to cite any examples, do I? They’re all over today’s newspapers, claiming that unregulated or deregulated or free markets are responsible for the collapse of various businesses.
There is no such thing as an unregulated market, however. [...]

There is a major flaw in Soros’ justification for spending $50m on a new think-tank. He derides “unchecked free markets” when in fact no such thing exists. You either have free markets checked by customer behavior, or you have markets which have been hampered by government action so producers are free to ignore customer behavior. [...]

The World Bank has recently released the latest Doing Business 2010 report, measuring the level of business and economic regulation around the world. In spite of the financial crisis and the global recession, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the United States retained the leadership as the most friendly locations for doing business. Notably, some [...]

In his comments in “The Australian” (8 Sept. ’09) on Paul Kelly’s new book, “The March of Patriots”, Kevin Rudd attempts to make a distinction between the economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating Labor governments and those of the Howard conservative government. Rudd describes the Hawke-Keating reforms as “modernising our economy to make it more competitive [...]

The study of economics should be clearly divided into its factual, quantifiable aspects (more commonly referred to as “econometrics”) distinct from the more philosophical and abstract study (generally known as ‘normative economics’). This is becoming increasingly important as the world has become ever more interdependent. The global financial crisis attests to this.
The argument in the [...]

The choice that we need to make is whether we want to move in the direction of freedom or in the direction of slavery.

Free markets are being blamed for the global economic crises, but there have been virtually no free markets in most of the world for decades. While not totally unfree, nearly all markets have been manipulated, managed, poked and prodded by bureaucrats and politicians. Whether the interventions were necesssary is a different question. What cannot be questioned is the fact that interventions were prevalent.

Death, taxes and government ownership of roads: all inevitabilities, right? Well, not according to Dr. Walter Block, professor of economics at Loyola University in New Orleans and senior fellow at the free-market Mises Institute. Dr. Block, whose most famous work, Defending the Undefendable, not only made a case for drug legalization but also argued that [...]