Economic (and financial crisis) links

[erudito]

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

Comments

[tyggerjai]

Sounds good to me. Lousy Australian dollar, plummeting house prices. I am looking forward to coming home as land-owning bourgeois scum!

When I left, my effective income was about AU$50K. It's now closer to 90, between the promotion and the lousy dollar. Megan similarly.

[taavi]

Supply restriction by officials is superfluous to your explanation. Land is naturally restricted (we can't make more of it) and markets have shown a natural tendency to boom and crash with or without regulation.

[tyggerjai]

Actually, I live and work on reclaimed land. I'd say approximately 40% of the total land area of Macau is reclaimed land, with more planned.

Not sure what the percentage is in Hong Kong, but it's significant, and has been going on for at least a hundred years.

Not housing particularly

[erudito]

Housing bubbles are not a recurrent feature of housing markets, except in recent years.

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).

Presumptions

[erudito]

If one has a presumption that markets/private action is fundamentally disfunctional, then any case of disfunction just gets treated as "natural tendency" and does not have to be inquired into further.

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.

[korgmeister]

That bailout is proving such a clusterfuck that even Republicans are saying outright that Paulson is just giving it out to his mates.

Yet again, corporate welfare succeeds in being the worst kind of welfare.