Greenspan's Body Count goes to India

This is one of the most under-reported stories in the Western press. There's an absolute epidemic of debt-suicides in India. Most weeks, multiple Indian debt-suicide stories cross my desk.

The latest:

Three members of a weaver family who could not repay a loan they had taken to invest in share markets committed suicide in their house in Madurai district on Sunday morning.

The deceased were identified as Krishna Ram (51), his wife Brinda (46) and their son Upendiran (28) of Meenakshi Nagar in Sourashtra Colony near Vandiyur. Krishna Ram and Brinda were handloom weavers, and they and Upendiran ended their lives by hanging from the handlooms installed in the house, police said.

Upendiran, who completed an undergraduate degree, had invested in share markets along with a few of his friends. The losses he suffered when the markets fell forced him to borrow money from loan sharks. As the family members did not have any other source of income to repay the loan, they might have decided to commit suicide, police said, adding that the exact amount they had borrowed was yet to be ascertained.

Shut 'em down

While Boner will likely repeat history and fold like a cheap suit, we can always dream...

George Will on the Dirty Fed

None other than the esteemed traditional conservative columnist George Will is sounding a lot like a Fed-bashing radical these days.

In the Washington Post, nonetheless! WCV readers will recognize some familiar themes (emphasis added).

Bernanke once hoped that economists might (in John Maynard Keynes’s words) “get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists.” But Bernanke speaks the heroic language of a central planner, talking about the Fed’s tasks of “economic management” and “economic engineering.”

[...]

ZIRP also makes the Fed an indispensable enabler of big government. By making borrowing, and hence deficits, cheap, ZIRP facilitates the political class’s bipartisan strategy of delivering current benefits while deferring costs. ZIRP also provides cheap credit to big government’s partner, big business.

General Theory of Liberalism hits Obamacare

We've been saying for years in our General Theory of Liberalism that the central theme of all ill-conceived liberal policies is liberals' failure to understand incentive effects.

Now comes WSJ's James Taranto to point out that the only way Obamacare will not collapse is if gullible young people can be persuaded to buy overpriced insurance that they don't need and can't afford.

But the success of ObamaCare depends on enrolling large numbers of young people while making insurance both more costly and less necessary for them. One can argue that buying insurance is a rational choice, but any way you slice it, that argument will be weaker under ObamaCare than it was before.

Incentives, people, incentives!

Rise of the Machines: textile manufacturing back, but without workers

Rise of the Machines is a recurring series here at WCV.

Today, the New York Times catches up to the trend with a front page story:

Bayard Winthrop, the founder of the sweatshirt and clothing company American Giant, was at the mill one morning earlier this year to meet with his Parkdale sales representative. Just last year, Mr. Winthrop was buying fabric from a factory in India. Now, he says, it is cheaper to shop in the United States. Mr. Winthrop uses Parkdale yarn from one of its 25 American factories, and has that yarn spun into fabric about four miles from Parkdale’s Gaffney plant, at Carolina Cotton Works.

Mr. Winthrop says American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Turnaround time is quicker. Most striking, labor costs — the reason all these companies fled in the first place — aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have largely turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers.

Longtime WCV readers will know that this Friday afternoon it is once again time to turn the speakers up to 11 and rock out to AC/DC's Who Made Who, with the video from Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive.

Five years later: The Day Capitalism Died

It was September 19, 2008 when central planners and crony capitalists killed the last vestiges of a free market.

Rest in Peace, America.

Dow, S&P hit all-time highs as Bernanke runs screaming from the Taper

Print MORE!!!