The Long-Awaited Dan Mitchell 2012 Predictions

Last January, I identified five things that worried me for 2011. Here’s what had me concerned, along with some ex post facto analysis about whether I was right to fret: 1. A back-door bailout of the states from the Federal Reserve – Thankfully, I was way off base with this concern. Not only was there [...]

Read Full Post »

Europe’s Clueless Politicians Are So Incompetent that They Can’t Even Figure Out How to Do the Wrong Thing

There’s always been a simple and desirable solution to Europe’s fiscal crisis, but nobody in Europe wants to do the right thing because it means admitting the failure of big government and it would result in less power for the political elite. So we get the spectacle of never-ending emergency summits as the political class [...]

Read Full Post »

Will Europe’s Feckless Politicians Destroy the Euro?

As demonstrated by the new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, there are five key lessons to learn from the fiscal crisis in Europe. Unfortunately, Europe’s despicable political class has not learned from their mistakes. They are not taking the simple and obvious steps that are needed to address the problems of spendthrift [...]

Read Full Post »

When Germany and France Both Agree on Something, You Can Safely Assume It Is a Terrible Idea

I’ve joked on many occasions that bipartisanship occurs in Washington when the evil party and the stupid party come up with an idea that is simultaneously malicious and misguided. The international version of two-wrongs-don’t-make-a-right occurs whenever the French and the Germans conspire on economic policy. The latest example is a joint proposal for “economic governance” [...]

Read Full Post »

The Clown Prince of Europe

If Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama are neck-and-neck competitors in the contest to be the public face of incompetent statism in America, then the competition in Europe is between Herman van Rompuy and Olga Stefou. But since I’ve already crowned Ms. Stefou as the Queen of Greece, then Mr Rompuy (a.k.a., President of the Euorpean Council) is the [...]

Read Full Post »

Looking at Europe’s Self-Inflicted Economic Disaster (and Getting a Glimpse of America’s Obamanian Future)

Allister Heath is one of the best economic columnists in Europe and his analysis of Europe’s fiscal situation is rather grim. But Americans can’t be smug. This is where the Bush-Obama policies, combined with demographics, are leading America. Here’s Allister’s analysis of where things stand in Europe. Gold hit £1,000 an ounce today for the [...]

Read Full Post »

Five Lessons from Ireland

The news is going from bad to worse for Ireland. The Irish Independent is reporting that the Swiss Central Bank no longer will accept Irish government bonds as collateral. The story also notes that one of the world’s largest bond firms, PIMCO, is no longer purchasing debt issued by the Irish government. And this is [...]

Read Full Post »

Riots in England Are another Sign of the Looming Collapse of Europe’s Welfare States

I’ve written before about the upcoming breakdown of the European welfare state, and my fingers are crossed that American policy makers will learn the right lessons and restrain the size and scope of government before we suffer from the social chaos and disarray that is sweeping through nations as varied as Greece and the United [...]

Read Full Post »

Don’t Blame Ireland’s Mess on Low Corporate Tax Rates

Ireland is in deep fiscal trouble and the Germans and the French apparently want the politicians in Dublin to increase the nation’s 12.5 percent corporate tax rate as the price for being bailed out. This is almost certainly the cause of considerable smugness and joy in Europe’s high-tax nations, many of which have been very [...]

Read Full Post »

Europe Is Royally %$(#&@, and America May Be Next

Jim Glassman has a thorough article in Commentary explaining that Europe is in deep trouble both because high tax rates discourage work and production and because excessive handouts encourage sloth and dependency. This should be a common-sense observation, but most politicians get votes by convincing voters they can have comfortable lives without producing. The inevitable [...]

Read Full Post »

Europe’s Dishonest “Stress Test” for Banks

The Wall Street Journal correctly pulls aside the veil and exposes the dubious gimmick that European politicians used to declare that banks are reasonably health. To put it bluntly, they assumed no government would ever default, which really means that the stress test was a fraud or German taxpayers are now on the chopping block [...]

Read Full Post »

Great Moments in International Bureaucracy

Europe’s economy is stagnant, the euro currency is in danger of collapse, and many nations are on the verge of bankruptcy. But one thing you can count on in this time of crisis is for prompt, thoughtful, and intelligent action by the super-bureaucrats of the European Commission. Right? Well, maybe not. You can be confident, however, [...]

Read Full Post »

The G-20 Fiscal Fight: A Pox on Both Their Houses

Barack Obama and Angela Merkel are the two main characters in what is being portrayed as a fight between American “stimulus” and European “austerity” at the G-20 summit meeting in Canada. My immediate instinct is to cheer for the Europeans. After all, “austerity” presumably means cutting back on wasteful government spending. Obama’s definition of “stimulus,” by [...]

Read Full Post »

European Central Bank President Wants to Exacerbate Continent’s Fiscal Crisis

It’s been amusing, in an I-told-you-so fashion, to follow the fiscal crises in Greece, Spain, and other European welfare states.And I feel like a voyeuristic ghoul as I observe the incredibly misguided bailout policies being adopted by the political elites (who are trying to bail out the business elites who made silly loans to corrupt nations [...]

Read Full Post »