The
economics of spam.
Zimbabwe’s public hospitals
are collapsing.
One can listen to Sir Bob Geldof’s $100,000 speech against poverty
here.
About
the border fence and legal and illegal immigration from Mexico to the US. A school district in Dallas
has been issuing fake Social Security numbers to get illegal immigrants on the payroll.
UN study
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Not sure what the percentage is in Hong Kong, but it's significant, and has been going on for at least a hundred years.
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And we can see quite clearly in the US, that housing markets where officials do not have discretionary control over market entry have not had housing bubbles.
The same distinction can be seen between the UK -- as linked above -- and Germany, where the "right to build" is built into the Constitution and house prices move about the rate of inflation. (Or a bit less, after the substandard East German stock was added in.)
Clearly, the discretionary power of officials over land use does make a difference. After all, land can have a wide variety of uses. If a use much in demand is restricted, that has an effect.
The dynamics are the same with taxi licenses (now about the same value in Melbourne as the median house).
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If one notes that markets can be highly functional, then disfunction becomes rather more analytically specific, so having specific reasons to be inquired into.
And asset bubbles certainly occur periodically, but are far from a normal state of affairs, so must have specific causes. That we have had quite a lot in recent years is striking, but that just makes inquiry into causes that more fascinating.
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Yes, they are, because they result from over-valuation of the future growth of elements of the economy, resulting in malinvestment and paper wealth which must be liquidated in the crash in order for the economy to eventually recover. However, state intervention can inflate bubbles higher and make the subsequent crashes much worse, by artificially propping up these over-valuations and delaying the crashes.
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