Entries Tagged 'Economics and Investing' ↓

This post is a response to “Fraud Is Good For You! (guest post) by “Gus,” publisher of Swindler’s Monthly: The Premier Journal for Cons Everywhere, now on hiatus as Gus serves time in federal prison for something he says he’s “completely and utterly innocent of”. Fraud Is Good For You! was published on Brucenomics on January 20, 2011.

Gus’ arguments for the economic benefits of fraud

Gus makes three main points in this essay. First, he claims “Fraud creates jobs — that’s something the Fed can’t seem to do! Second, Gus reminds us, “Fraud does not create or destroy wealth — it merely redistributes wealth”. And lastly, Gus claims that “Fraud is good — fraud gives people hope.”

Fraud creates jobs – something the Fed can’t seem to do

Continue reading →

This month I am in the middle of a series about why we need economists return to political science. Well, one economist, a liberal economist at that, has just done this. If you haven’t read my last two posts yet, “Political Economy: An Old System for a New Day” and “Checks and Balances For the Field of Economics” you may want to look at them.

I want to call your attention to an awesome editorial by economist Robert Reich in the Financial Times on January 16, 2012, called “We are all going to hell in a shopping basket”. Professor Reich has returned to the roots of economics, the field of “political economy” to analyze the present malaise in this country. (If the above link doesn’t work, type the full title in Google.) Continue reading →

Last time, in  Political Economy: An Old System for a New Day we looked at how much the world has changed since the times when the United States of America was founded and Adam Smith, the Scottish economists published his classic study of political economy, called The Wealth of Nations.

This time (and in the next couple of posts), we’ll be see how the notion of checks and balances from the US Constitution applied to economics is one way of bridging the gap between politics and economics today.

We’ll start by looking at how economics differs from the study of political economy in the 16th through 19th centuries. We’ll see why the field of political economy changed its name to economics at the end of the 19th century. This was throwing out the baby with the bathwater! We now need to go back and rejoin politics with economics. Read on to see why. Continue reading →