Thursday, July 5, 2012

Interesting Pieces in Today's WSJ

Several interesting pieces in today's Wall Street Journal.  John Taylor on monetary policy and the next crisis is quite good.  He doesn't say so, but it strikes me that if price controls distort, continued low interest rates must also distort.  On a different note, Stephen Moore writes about lessons regarding energy policy from the power outage in his neigborhood.  He argues that as we pursue green energy and actively disourage coal and natural gas, we can expect such outages on a regular basis.  Austan Goolsbee writes about the impact of the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare, claiming there wasn't one. He argues that this shows that the slow recovery is not due to business fears over regulation. If so, markets would have dropped and they did not.  This relies on the belief that the markets had not anticipated the Supreme Court's decision though.  He offers some other interesting empirical tests though.
Finally, a news article that got a lot of attention on Squawk Box this morning--some cities are considering using eminent domain to seize mortgages from banks, write down the amount so the owners can stay in their homes.  To do so, they would have to compensate the holders of the mortgages, but the plan would be to pay them the "market value" of the mortgage rather than the contracted amount.  There has been a widening of the power of eminent domain to take property even when it is not to be used by the government.  I find this very disconcerting.  It strikes me as a weakening of the rule of law--one of the key ingredients for an economy to be successful

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