French Quarter

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  • Douglas French

Great Vegas Stories Never Told Oct 2, 2016

Anyone who fills three hours every weekday on the radio must have a lot to say. And if the radio personality was once a lounge singer and a Las Vegas cocktail waitress, imagine the stories she could tell? A reader would expect Heidi Harris’s “Cocktail Waitress Wisdom” to be chalk full of her lessons learned via juicy stories of her days toting drinks to celebrities and high rollers. And Vegas being Vegas maybe there would be some chronicling of after hours hijinks with said celebrities and high rollers. No such luck for buyers of the “Las Vegas’ Radio Showgirl’s” first...

By Douglas French Vote3 0

Living On The Edge Jun 17, 2016

Writing for Forbes, Bryan Rich, claims the economy is better than you think and credits the central bank. “The Fed has manufactured a recovery by promoting stability, writes Rich.  “And they’ve relied on two key asset prices to do it: stocks and housing.” Like any good Keynesian, Rich is happy the deleveraging that occurred after 2007 is nearly over, claiming “paying down debt has weighed on economic growth.” He concludes with the old saw, “Consumption makes up more than 2/3 of the U.S. economy.  And you can see..., the consumer is in a solid position.” But has the consumer really...

By Douglas French Vote7 1

Economics and Classical Music: It’s a Jungle May 18, 2016

Amazon’s quirky, sexy “Mozart in the Jungle” has been greenlighted for a third season, a testament to the need for many platforms serving the unique viewing palates of TV viewers.  It’s safe to say “Mozart” would never make it to network TV.  The subject--the lifestyle of classical musicians--is a bit too esoteric for the taste of Americans not living in symphony cities. The series won two Golden Globes for Season 2, and, as Variety reports, “conductor character Rodrigo and the show’s other musicians will head to Europe in the new (3rd) season, which begins production later this year.” The charismatic...

By Douglas French Vote6 0

Boring Belle Apr 9, 2016

If The Big Short, Margin Call, or 99 Homes didn’t satisfy your cinematic financial crash craving, coming soon will be a depiction of the collapse from the female perspective, courtesy of Reese Witherspoon’s Pacific Standard by way of Warner Brothers--”Opening Belle.” A junkie for crash stories, I eagerly loaded Maureen Sherry’s novel into my Kindle. Loosely based on Sherry’s experience as a managing director at Bear Stearns, her personal website calls the book “Working Girl meets The Wolf of Wall Street.”  That’s not even half right. It’s more like “9 to 5” meets “Primates of Park Avenue.” “In a good...

By Douglas French Vote5 0

Modern Finance: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone Feb 4, 2016

In his book Other People’s Money: The Real Business of Finance, author John Kay quotes Lord Keynes’s idiom, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are generally distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” The men and women with authority over monetary matters are indeed mad. Mad enough to see interest rates, not as pricing the present versus the future, after all, the idea that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar in the future is axiomatic. No, the Fed’s crystal ball sees lenders paying for the privilege of going without...

By Douglas French Vote6 0

The Fed’s Bloody Hands Nov 19, 2015

So while Alan Greenspan was being knighted and Ben Bernanke was named Time’s Person of the Year, “After 1998, other rich countries’ mortality rates continued to decline by 2 percent a year. In contrast, U.S. white non-Hispanic mortality rose by half a percent a year. No other rich country saw a similar turnaround,” conclude Angus Denton and his co-author and wife Anne Case.   “Drugs and alcohol, and suicide . . . are clearly the proximate cause,” says Deaton, “Half a million people are dead who should not be dead,” he added. “About 40 times the Ebola stats. You’re getting up there...

By Douglas French Vote5 1

The Education of a Speechwriter Aug 29, 2015

The summer’s Trumpalooza tour looks to extend into fall, with “Make America Great Again” now under trademark protection. The Donald says he has no speechwriters, doesn’t read from a teleprompter, and changes his speeches because the news media carries every word he says live everyday. Well, anyone who has watched more than one of his talks knows he spews the same nonsense every time.  Even the laugh lines are the same. “You know the Saudis are making a billion dollars a day? Well, maybe not quite that much at $40 oil.   But, half a billion a day ain’t so bad.”...

By Douglas French Vote8 1

Dancing for Hundreds, Suing for Minimum Wage Aug 27, 2015

Talk of raising the minimum wage has been all the buzz this year, with picketers marching in front of McDonald’s chanting “15 in 15,” as in dollars per hour this calendar year. But there is another minimum wage fight involving women like Sarah Brey. Ms. Brey is an author, English professor, yoga instructor, and exotic dancer. Her first book, The Go-Go Professor, was a how-to-be-successful guide to what’s known as go-go dancing in New Jersey. It’s a pithy read offering good advice (learn to speak English, don’t chew gum, shower) for the mostly foreign woman who dance in places like...

By Douglas French Vote10 1

Trump: The Art of the Bureaucrat Aug 17, 2015

Hello world!

By Douglas French Vote13 3

Making Markets Straight to Hell Aug 10, 2015

Individual investors hold the pros on Wall Street in high esteem.  The people who work in the financial markets must be smart and serious. That’s where all of the graduates from the top schools end up. The big money draws the biggest brains and discipline.  That’s why the “Wolf of Wall Street” seemed so outlandish. Sure, those guys working the pump and dump outfits might have drank and drugged themselves blind, but not those working at the big name firms. Nobel Prize winner Eugene Fama tells us the markets are efficient, that all information is known by all market participants...

By Douglas French Vote4 1

Bankrupt Candidate for a Bankrupt Nation Jul 30, 2015

“Voters vote on how they feel and what their instinct is,” Howard Dean said on Morning Joe, explaining Donald Trump’s popularity in the polls and in particular with the New Hampshire focus group that John Heilemann spoke with.  I think H.L. Mencken, if he were alive, would look at the group, smile, and toast the booboisie [(boo-bwa-ZEE) noun: a selected part of the general populace composed of uneducated, uncultured people] with a frosty beer and a stogie.  A candidate with a house of cards financial statement is perfect to run a government in the same condition. These good folks to...

By Douglas French Vote6 0

Short Rates, Short Memories Jul 24, 2015

This piece originally appeared at LewRockwell.com.   Rates are low, the weather is hot, and builders are more active than they’ve been in years. “Groundbreakings on new homes surged 26.6% and permits to build new homes rose 30% in June compared to one year ago, the U.S. Commerce Department said Friday,” reports Forbes. Housing construction hasn’t seen this kind of action in eight years. Never mind that median income has gone nowhere for two decades except down the last seven years. Plus, plenty of scar tissue remains from the housing crash with nearly 16.5 million homes vacant and over five...

By Douglas French Vote3 0

The Golden Age of TV Jul 23, 2015

TV is just amazing. Remember your frustration, especially during the summer, “there’s nothing on but re-runs.” Boy did that get fixed and then some. Imagine kids today if they were stuck with the three major networks? And now Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. Besides some regulatory changes, Robert Prechter, of Elliott Wave fame, says social mood has much to do with the quality of entertainment in a piece entitled “On Breaking Bad: How Social Mood Helped it Become the ‘Best Ever’ Program.” “Certain times of peak social mood support peak artistic achievements in many fields, including the field of popular entertainment,”...

By Douglas French Vote7 4

No End in Sight For Higher-Education Malinvestment Jun 26, 2015

Those of us leaning in the Austrian direction see bubbles and malinvestments around every corner and assume, wrongly as it turns out, the market will right these wrongs lickity split. But, for the moment a rational market is no match for cheap money. “Any college that is thinking about capital expansion, now is a very good time,” Robert Murray, an economist at Dodge Data told the Wall Street Journal. “Several years down the road, the climate might not be as good.” Now being a good time because stock market gains have pumped up endowments, “and low interest rates have created...

By Douglas French Vote9 4

Hidden in Fannie and Freddie Jun 24, 2015

This article first appeared at mises.ca. With another financial crisis fast approaching the cause of the ‘08 crash hasn’t been settled. Austrians generally line up on the side of the all-powerful Fed having lowering interest rates below what the market would produce, sending capital into malinvestments: In this case, too many subdivisions of houses and other real estate. When the Fed hit the brakes in ‘06, raising its fed funds rate, housing peaked and the party was brought to an abrupt and painful end as the value of mortgage backed securities melted down. I’ve given this talk plenty of times,...

By Douglas French Vote4 2

It’s Dope Jun 23, 2015

President Obama made some news by saying the N-word during a podcast yesterday. CNN quotes the President, "It's not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public." It may not be polite, but evidently the word is frequently used in the black community because it’s heard hundreds of times in Rick Famuyiwa’s movie Dope, set in "The Bottoms" neighborhood of Inglewood, California. Names are eschewed as every character is referred to as, you know, that word the president used. Even white slacker and hacker Will Sherwood (Blake Anderson) figures he’s close enough to Malcolm (Shameik...

By Douglas French Vote8 1

Boom, Bust, Litigate Jun 8, 2015

Irony dropped in for a visit to the banking world last week with the news J.P. Morgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon is now a billionaire. Mr. Dimon, who famously told Wall Street banking analyst Mike Mayo on an earnings call, “That’s why I’m richer than you,” is neither a successful entrepreneur nor trust fund baby, just a working stiff--a highly paid one. He’s earned millions in salary each year, been granted more than a few stock options, and now he’s in, what Russ Hanneman of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” calls “the three comma club.” Meanwhile, about 70 former employees of Washington...

By Douglas French Vote2 0

Mad Max: Is This What Anarchy Looks Like? May 25, 2015

When we first met Mad Max it was 1979. Prices rose by 11.2% that year, led by gasoline which was up almost 37%. Despite mortgage rates at 11.2%, home prices were accelerating nearly 15%. Casey Research’s Jeff Clark points out that the economy was slowing but employment increased as “labor looked cheap since prices were growing faster than wages. Also, unemployment is a lagging indicator—and it sharply worsened later, when another recession hit in 1980.” The financial system was on the verge of a meltdown with hundreds of banks to vanish in the 1980’s. Stagflation was about to become something...

By Douglas French Vote6 0

Work for Liberty in a Black Robe May 23, 2015

There’s plenty of libertarian activism, yet America is still a sea of fascism and socialism with the cheering mob firmly entrenching a police industrial complex into place to help them sleep at night. The great unwashed are easy pickings for the policing-for-profit boys and girls in blue who maraude city streets and beyond ensnaring the un-lawyered with intimidation and incarceration. After hearing a few stories from former District Court Judge John Denson, I believe for the young and ambitious there might a better way to fight the good fight for liberty.  Judge Denson is the reason the Mises Institute is...

By Douglas French Vote4 0

Where to Earn a Degree in Liberty May 1, 2015

In 1946, Leonard Read founded the Foundation of Economic Education because he recognized that learning is the key to advancing human liberty. The effort that Read began nearly 70 years ago remains “a learning process and not a selling problem.” Read himself touted FDR’s New Deal programs on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce until he met Bill Mullendore, an executive with Southern California Edison. Mullendore showed him that the New Deal was a raw deal that redistributed wealth, sapping the country’s productivity while strangling personal freedoms. It’s hard for those of us who have benefited from Read’s wisdom...

By Douglas French Vote5 11

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