Falling gold piece

My latest at FrumForum: "Beck Didn't Warn Me Gold Can Fall!" Excerpt:

The gold market meltdown — with prices plunging in recent weeks from over $1,900 an ounce to under $1,600 — is a reminder that the precious metal is a volatile, speculative commodity. It also signals a bear market in credibility for the many right-leaning cable-news and talk-radio hosts who have touted gold relentlessly in recent years as a hedge against economic calamity.

“If you’ve been watching for any length of time, and you still haven’t looked into buying gold, what’s wrong with you?” Glenn Beck said in a video on his website in 2009. “I think you’re nuts.” His TV show, meanwhile, featured frequent calls to buy gold, interspersed with commercials for gold retailers.

Whole thing here. It's getting comments at a brisk pace; people get emotional about gold, which is a problem.

UPDATE: A rejoinder by Brad Schaeffer: "Numbers Don't Lie, Gold Has Done Well."

Resilient greenback

My latest at FrumForum: "Still Sound as a Dollar." Excerpt:

Conservatives nowadays routinely worry about the dollar’s strength and stability. The dollar, however, refuses to cooperate. Instead, it lately has been rising in foreign-exchange markets, as it typically does in times of international economic and financial stress.

The dollar serves as a safe haven. Investors tend to transfer funds into dollar-denominated assets, such as U.S. Treasuries, at moments when financial markets around the world are being buffeted. This occurs even if the U.S. economy is not in good shape. As long as the dollar and dollar-denominated assets are seen as relatively safe, the dollar will tend to strengthen in times of trouble.

Whole thing here.

Debate 9/22

Over at FrumForum, live-blogging the GOP debate.

Nepal starry night

Our 2009 trip to Nepal, including the Annapurna region, included many wonderful sights (see here, for instance), but I don't recall seeing much of the night sky, as it was fairly rainy and overcast on nights we were camping. Bad Astronomy and io9, though, have a remarkable photo of the Milky Way as seen from Annapurna. Take a look.

Space debate question

What would I ask at the GOP debate this Thursday? A space policy question:

One subject that’s been almost entirely absent from the campaign is space policy. The Obama administration scrapped the Bush administration’s plans for a return to the moon, and the end of the Space Shuttle program has left the U.S. currently without the ability to send astronauts to Earth orbit, let alone beyond. There’s little consensus about what NASA’s next steps should be or what role the private sector might play. Do you have a vision for what the United States should do in space, how to do it and how to pay for it?

More questions by others here.

Rocket to nowhere

Over at FrumForum, my latest: "NASA's New Rocket Won't Reach New Frontiers," about the just-unveiled plans for the Space Launch System. Excerpt:

The impetus for this rocket was congressional pressure. First the Obama administration scrapped the Bush administration’s Constellation project of renewed lunar exploration, and as the Space Shuttle Program began to end. In response, lawmakers pressed for a new heavy-lift rocket that, far from incidentally, would preserve some NASA and contractor jobs, particularly in states such as Texas and Florida that are heavy with space facilities.

There is tremendous uncertainty about future space funding and whether any future administration — or for that matter, the Obama administration — will take seriously the President’s stated goal of sending humans to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars at some later time.

Thicket

Posting may be light as we get through the tall grass of catching up on various projects. But you can never be too sure what's coming -- there were deer in this scene a split second before I took the picture.

A look back

Myles Dannhausen Jr., journalist at the Wisconsin Peninsula Pulse, spoke to me about 9/11. Excerpt:

Ten years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks killed 2,977 people and shook the nation to its core, Ground Zero is still a construction site, the United States is still embroiled in two wars, and our defense budget is conservatively pegged at more than twice what it was before the attacks.

Yet, Ken Silber, an economics and politics writer and native New Yorker, says that the state of the nation today is "pretty far to the optimistic end of the spectrum."

                         

"If you had told me then, in the days after Sept. 11, that life in America would be the way it is now, I would have said that it was a relatively good scenario."

 Whole thing here.

Debate 9/7

I participated in FrumForum's liveblogging of tonight's GOP debate. The transcript is here.

Perry vs science

My latest at FrumForum: "If it's Perry: Anti-Science Label Sticks." Excerpt:

If Rick Perry is the nominee, we will hear stepped-up criticism that there is a Republican “war on science,” that the GOP is anti-intellectual and antipathetic to facts and analysis. Such criticism will resonate with many voters, precisely because Perry’s nomination will be evidence that it’s true.

In August, shortly after entering the race, Perry generated controversy with comments about climate change and biological evolution. He dismissed anthropogenic global warming as an unproven assertion by scientists who have “manipulated data” to spur funding for their projects. He described evolution as a theory with “some gaps in it” and said that it’s taught alongside creationism in Texas (which if true would raise questions about the constitutionality of Texas’ science curricula).

 Whole thing here.

Ten years later

In the September issue of Research, I look back to 9/11 and ahead to future crises: "Wall Street at War."

Cover art by James O'Brien.

The view from 6 million miles away

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. More info here.

Deadliest Warrior redux

Welcome, readers of STORMBRINGER. I was quite pleased this weekend to discuss "Deadliest Warrior" with Sean Linnane, an actual warrior, and am honored that he took interest in my FrumForum piece on the subject.

Alien reading list

When I have a chance, I intend to read more thoroughly this paper, which I've only skimmed so far: "Would contact with extraterrestrials benefit or harm humanity? A scenario analysis." (I wrote on a similar theme a few years ago.)

The paper has caused a bit of kerfuffle, involving sensationalism, misunderstanding and politicization. See:

"Some important points of clarification," by one of the paper's coauthors.

"Bad news from NASA: If we don’t reduce carbon emissions, the aliens might come and kill us; Update: Not a NASA report," Hot Air.

"Right Wing Blogs in Massive Anti-Science Fail Mode," Little Green Footballs.

UPDATE: "Space Aliens Are Probably Progressive Liberals," National Review.

No thanks, Perry

One of my major differences with prevailing sentiment in the GOP is over climate change -- accepting the reality of it and the anthropogenic nature of it, and then developing policies (such as carbon taxes) aimed at limiting its extent and impact. Another major difference I have with today's Republicans overall is about the Fed -- partly over the particular policies it's implemented in recent years (which strike me as basically on the right track even if monetary policy alone cannot solve our economic problems) but more fundamentally that the Fed fulfills crucial functions and needs a degree of independence to do so, hence it should not be demonized (or for that matter abolished).

Rick Perry has come down powerfully on the wrong side of both issues, in substance and in tone, in his first week of campaigning. What will he do next week?

Economic Principals update

Long ago, I wrote a review for Reason of Economic Principals: Masters and Mavericks of Modern Economics, by David Warsh. This was so long ago in fact (1993) that Reason's online archives don't go back that far, though my review can be found here. In the interest of examining the diversity of ways for trying to generate income through writing for the Web, I note that Warsh now runs his former newspaper column as a website that's free but that gives an early edition and a quarterly newsletter to buyers of a $50 subscription.

The Great Stagnation

At FrumForum, I review The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, by Tyler Cowen. Excerpt:

For several hundred years, Cowen argues, the Western world in general and America in particular have benefitted from relatively abundant or accessible sources of economic growth — “low-hanging fruit” — such as newly opened land, expanded education, and technological breakthroughs ranging from electricity to pharmaceuticals.

The trouble is, he contends, the low-hanging fruit has been getting sparse in the past several decades. Yes, there is still much technological innovation but it’s largely focused on Internet-related sectors that don’t necessarily produce a lot of jobs or revenue. A great deal of financial innovation has been occurring but that only enriches small numbers of people without necessarily producing much social benefit.

The rest includes discussion of Ayn Rand, John Horgan and the social status of scientists. Whole thing here.

Hard money

David Frum has a valuable discussion of monetary history revolving around the 40-years-ago "Nixon shock." In light of Rick Perry's remarks yesterday about Bernanke's "near treason," I add a modest proposal about applying some hard-core free-market monetary policy in Texas first. I also note with amusement that the anonymous "businessman and investor" cited by Bill Kristol the other day on Fed policy has now made his way into a comment by John Podhoretz, who touts the unnamed guy's reputation as "unimpeachable."

UPDATE: Also recommended, Bruce Bartlett on "Nixon's Biggest Gamble..." And I wrote something on it here.

Bill Kristol's anti-Fed friend

Over at FrumForum, I ask: "Who Wants Higher Interest Rates?" Opening:

Over at the Weekly Standard’s blog, William Kristol reproduces an email he’s received from an unnamed “businessman and investor” for whose judgment Kristol says he has the “highest regard.” The email lambastes the policies of the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke in no uncertain terms.

Here it is with my comments appended...

Whole thing here.

UPDATE 8/11: I'll be participating in some live-blogging of the GOP debate at FrumForum at 9 ET tonight. UPDATE: Archived here.

UPDATE 8/12: Welcome to Marginal Revolution readers of "How Did Libertarians Lose Their Way?"

Monetary crankdom update

A few notes involving currencies. I mention these topics in passing for the moment, lacking the time just now to give them the more in-depth treatment I'd prefer.

George Will, lately a more libertarian-leaning figure than long thought to be, writes that "events seem to be validating [Ron Paul's] message, which is that the country's financial condition is awful." But isn't Ron Paul's message that the country's financial condition can be drastically improved by getting rid of the Fed and implementing a gold standard and/or competing currencies? And given that it is, what effect would such policies have in the current troubled financial situation? Would not a gold standard, insofar as it truly is binding, render the federal government actually incapable of paying its bills and thus cause vastly worse turmoil than we have now? Or is the whole question of a gold standard not worth discussing, because such a policy would be abandoned readily in times such as the present, thus raising a profound credibility issue that gold-standard proponents have never been able to resolve? And as for competing currencies...

... It wasn't that long ago, just a few months, that a wave of libertarian enthusiasm arose over the electronic currency Bitcoin and the liberation it offered from government oversight. How's Bitcoin doing now, you ask?