Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I have to say "cheers," and "hear!hear!" and all that to the British Parliament, and perhaps especially to those Tory party members who defied party discipline to oppose the march toward war. US Presidents are hesitant to launch such adventures without the mother country's support. I got some sense of this back when Tony Blair was acting as W's enabler. Cameron stepped up to attempt to play the same role, but it appears at the moment that Parliament has led him to back down. That is good for them and it may prove lucky for us. I'm not sure I can call any possible result of all this "lucky" for the people of Syria. Their fate looks like a dim one on almost any conceivable time line for years to come. Yet I don't believe that US/UK intervention would have made it any better. Ever since the Obama administration has been talking up a strike, I've been wondering this: when do we start calling a series of [separate?] conflicts a...

The latest catalog to reach my desk from the Brit business/economics publisher Edward Elgar focuses on management issues. It's also for "handbooks," though I'm not sure how that's defined other than as books with the word "Handbook" on the cover. Three random selections, and a wisecrack for each: 1. Handbook of Research on Entrepreneurship Policies in Central and Eastern Europe. 272 pages, $160. Boris Badinov is an entrepreneur now. Natasha is a venture capitalist. "And what is your business plan, my darlink?" "It involves makink big trouble for moose and squirrel." 2. Handbook of Longitudinal Research Methods in Organisation and Business Studies 383 pages, $225 Yes, I had to look it up. "Longitudinal" in the relevant sense means that in the studiesin question the same subjects are observed repeatedly over a period of time. It has nothing to do with, say, trochaic meter, although that was the first thought i...

Recently, on an assignment for AllAboutAlpha, I had the privilege of interviewing James Rickards, the author of CURRENCY WARS. Since I've been following the Yellen-versus-Summers speculation here somewhat, as to who will be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, I will quote Rickards briefly on both of them here, then send you to the full interview. On Janet Yellen, he said that she is "a known  quantity, a monetary dove who would be very slow to taper if at all, she might even speed the money creation." On Lawrence Summers, though, the verdict was more devastating: "Summers is neither a hawk nor a dove. He's a wild card."

I recently encountered a neat little dialog written by JP Hochbaum entitled "If Keynesians and Austrians were horticulturists." I don't draw the same conclusions from it that he does, but I admire the brio he brought to his analogy, and I've done my best to hijack it below. I haven't gotten his permission to quote it at length, so I won't. The gist of it is that the Keynesian wisely wants to water the dying plants. The Austrian economist (supposed to be the butt of the analogy) wants to rely on the natural water cycle, allowing the plants to die if they don't get rain. "We need to wait for the sky to give us rain." Now think about this ... isn't the Austrian in the right, even given the terms of Hochbaum's analogy? I think of the plants in question as capital investments of various sorts.  So some investments succeed (grow and bloom), some investments fail (shrivel and die). Any investment should be allowed to fail. There should b...

  Our earlier discussions on this blog of accounting basics have focused on the assets side of a balance sheet. Now let’s move over to the right-hand side. This includes the two great subdivisions of liabilities and equity. For a simple business entity we might break down the liabilities section into just two parts itself: accounts payable and notes payable. Accounts payable is the obverse of the accounts receivable heading on the asset side. Payables are (typically non-interest bearing) debts that the firm must pay to its trade creditors, like the due bill to the electricity company for the juice that keeps that conveyor belt moving.   A bit of forensic accounting here: when a business is audited because fraud is suspected (either because the principals of the business are worried about a crooked employee or because investors/creditors worry about the potential crookedness of the principals), the payables are always an object of great scrutiny. The diversion of ...

The speculation continues about the successor to Ben Bernanke. From a breaking-glass-ceilings point of view, Janet Yellen, now the vice chair, would become the first female chair. Crash-tingle-ouch. From an impressive resume point of view, she is a very impressive candidate, glass crashing notwithstanding. She is, after all, the vice chair at present. She was for more than six years President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Under Bill Clinton, she was a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisors. Going back a bit further, she did her undergrad work at Brown University and her graduate studies at Yale, receiving a Ph.D. from the latter in 1971. She is what is known in monetary policy as a "dove." The term arose because somebody somewhere internalized the metaphor of a "war" on inflation. So central bankers willing to risk recession or worse to fight inflation are "hawks" and those willing to make peace with inflation ...

On August 14th, the vice president of Egypt resigned that post after just one month in office. With everything else that is going on in Egypt, this didn't get a lot of attention in the U.S. The crowds in the streets get attention, the killing to clear protest camps, even the imminent release of former president Mubarak. These things  get attention.. But ElBaradei? Meh. This is important, though, because this particular Vice President was an internationally respected name, and critical to the post-Morsi government's hopes of receiving broad recognition of its legitimacy. Regular readers will recall that I made the same point at the time ElBaradei became VP (something of a lateral move from that of prime minister.) As I noted then, ElBaradei is the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In that position he was appropriately skeptical of American claims about weapons of mass destruction in either Iraq or Iran, but he took a...