≡ Menu

Some Links

In today’s Washington Times, CEI’s Ryan Young (a GMU Econ alum, I boast) explains that the U.S. Export-Import Bank is pro-business and not pro-market.  A slice:

Ex-Im Bank has a long history of giving special treatment to politically favored sectors, such as renewable energy and other green industries. In fact, 10 percent of Ex-Im Bank’s authorizations are required to go to renewable-energy projects, and there are tight restrictions on financing “high-carbon intensity” projects, regardless of economic merit. That’s wonderful for those individual green businesses, but terrible for the economy at large.  This kind of favoritism erodes the competitive market process. There is only so much investment capital to go around. Every time Ex-Im Bank secures favorable terms for one of its beneficiaries, another company elsewhere has to pay more to attract scarce financing — or may lose access to it entirely. Worse, over the years, Ex-Im Bank has helped secure financing for politically connected companies, such as Enron and Solyndra. Imagine what other uses that wasted capital could have been put to instead, if only pro-business politics had stayed out of financing decisions.

Speaking of the great geyser of cronyism that is the Ex-Im Bank, Tim Carney offers this account of the absurd arguments that champions of this cronyism shamelessly offer.

Sarah Skwire and Steve Horwitz expose as shoddy Thomas Piketty’s use of literature (although I’m not quite as impressed as are Sarah and Steve by Tom Wolfe’s portrayal, in Bonfire of the Vanities, of professional financiers).

Speaking of Piketty, Steve Fritzinger isn’t impressed.  A slice:

As someone who has had his share of success and failure investing, I can tell you that generating above-average returns for decades is not as easy as Piketty thinks.  As famed tech investor Marc Andreesen noted in a recent interview, “The funny thing about Piketty is that he has a lot more faith in returns on invested capital than any professional investor I’ve ever met…. He assumes it’s really easy to put money in the market for 40 years or 80 years or 100 years and have it compound at these amazing rates. He never explains how that’s supposed to happen.”

In today’s Washington Post, George Will explains the radical hostility to free speech of many members of the U.S. Senate.

A poem, by Scott McPherson.

Comments

Next post:

Previous post: