American Thinker Blog Post, Don Boudreaux on Judge Napolitano Talking About Public Supermarkets, and AP Interview with Jim Grant

I have a blog post on the American Thinker today discussing the debt ceiling and how it will be raised.  Here are some excerpts:

As the U.S. has just reached its current debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion, it is incredibly sobering to see just how much debt the federal government has rung up in just thirty years.  The irony, of course, lies in the fact that it was a Republican-controlled Senate and the Reagan administration that pushed for the ceiling to be raised back then. 

So much for Reagan being the stalwart of cutting government spending.

Now, the fight is beginning all over again.  Democrats and President Obama (who infamously voted against raising the debt ceiling as a senator back in 2006) are pushing for Congress to raise the debt ceiling in order for the U.S. not to default on the debt.  Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has warned that failure to raise the ceiling will be "catastrophic" to the global economy as interest rates would rise for both public and private borrowing.  Judging by Geithner's previous tax troubles, my faith is lacking in TurboTax Tim's ability to manage his own personal finances, let alone the whole country's.

I posted on this before, but now Don Boudreaux has finally been given a national television platform to speak on the complete idiocy of our current public education system.  Though the interview is short and lacking in substance, it is good for a mainstream audience:

Wall Street commentator Jim Grant has a pretty decent interview with the Associated Press on Yahoo! Finance today discussing inflation, the rising stock market, the possibility of QE3, and reminiscing on a time when the government actually allowed deflation.  Some excerpts:

Q: What would you have done in the financial crisis if you had been in Bernanke's position?
A: Resign. I don't know. I have great faith in the price mechanism, in the mechanics of markets. I think there should have been much less intervention and we should have let some chips fall, many chips fall.
Before the Great Depression, there was a great depression (lower case `g') in 1920-21. Within 18 months, the GDP was down double digits and commodity prices collapsed. Harry Truman lost his haberdashery in Kansas City. It was very painful, but it ended. And the Fed, during that depression, actually raised its discount rate and the Treasury ran a surplus. The reason it ended was the so-called real balance effect -- that is, prices came down and people with savings saw things that were cheap and they invested. That's the fast and ugly approach.
The slow and ugly approach is to mitigate, temporize and forestall to give us time to work ourselves out of difficulties. That's the current approach. I think it's intended to be a more humane approach, but I wonder about its humanity. I mean these college kids get out of school and they've got nothing. It's awful -- 9 percent unemployment and going nowhere except sideways.

Q: You've been warning about higher inflation for a while. How imminent is it?
A: I've been all wrong on this. I thought that this massive monetary stuff would generate the conventional kind of inflation that would be expressed in much higher CPI readings. Not so far. But all things are cyclical and the seemingly impossible is just around the corner. On September 30, 1981, the 30-year US Treasury bond traded at 14 7/8 percent and I remember some crank, some visionary, was talking about how interest rates were going to zero, you watch. Oh, yeah right. And so it came to pass.
It does seem improbable that the inflation rate would ever get beyond 3.5 percent, let alone knock on the door of 10 percent. But I'm here to tell you it's going to 10 percent.
Q: Won't policymakers come down hard if we get even 6 percent inflation and try to lower that?
A: Sometimes they can't control things. We had 6 percent inflation before. Washington is full of well-intentioned people. Ben Bernanke keeps saying that what we really need is a little inflation. He says we'll get 2 percent or a little bit more. You shouldn't even think that, let alone say it out loud. That's such bad luck to tempt fate by saying that you can calibrate things like that. You can't do that.

I will end with this surprising report from the Swiss Journal NZZ claiming that that if ECB, IMF, and EU officials don't approve of another round of bailouts, Greece will go insolvent in July:

If experts from the EU, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB) do not give the go ahead for the next installment of the bailout package totaling 12 billion euros by the end of June give, then Greece will become insolvent on July 18, as the conservative Journal "Kathimerini" reported.

Of course going insolvent, declaring bankruptcy, and restructuring the debt would be the logical thing to do so don't expect any EU officials or monetary authorities to let it happen.