Jim's Jumbled Tumblr

...power-mad bureaucrats probably outnumber kidnappers and serial killers at least a thousand to one.

The IMF believe that the “black economy” is about 30% of Italy’s GDP

Free and responsible men and women do not take seriously those who use their fame as a platform to issue advice about matters on which they know nothing

You know it’s bad when banks are the most truthful guys in the room.

When proponents of government intervention make their case, it is nearly always in terms of intent. "X is bad, Y would be better, and we need government intervention to get Y." The fact that government intervention often yields Z, and Z is worse than X, is forever being overlooked.

I wouldn't have thought that the question of why working class marriage rates have fallen would be a sharply partisan issues. But since Charles Murray decided that moral decay is to blame, many of his critics have started countering that poor economic outlook for working class men over the past decade is the issue. The obvious third hypothesis, it seems to me, is that with women's social and economic opportunities much improved over the past several decades they're less reliant on marriage as a form of social and economic support.

Mr Barnier, the (French) EU Commissioner is pushing President Sarkozy’s financial transactions tax. Good luck mate – only means that there will be even better French restaurants in London to service the flood of French traders moving across the Channel (or La Manche, if I remember my French) to London.

Testing

Usually, it is the banks that are fighting efforts to impose new regulations on the industry. Now, it is foreign governments fighting against bank regulations in the United States.

Pause

Time Out

In other words, no matter how much the Fed and the Administration try to flog the economy, nothing has really worked. As much as Bernanke boasted about being able to prevent another depression, he and the Bush-Obama Administrations have done everything they could to make things worse. And the classic indicators of a depression are still playing out and reminding us of the inefficacy and incompetence of conventional economic wisdom.

Comparing between countries we see that the poorest 5% of Americans are among the richest people in the world (richer than nearly 70% of other people in the world). The poorest 5% of Americans, for example, are richer than the richest 5% of Indians.