Sublime

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The end or modification of the student loan system will suddenly limit not only how much universities can raise costs but whether they can maintain them.

I thought that I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America, when a great nation lost its financial mind.

Morgan made his specialty the refinancing, reorganization, and rationalization of America’s badly overextended and overcapitalized railroads; his “clients” included some of the largest, such as the Erie, the New York Central, and the Pennsylvania.

were known as “straw buyers”—might not exist, or might be victims of identity theft. Or they might be Sonny Kim’s partners in mortgage fraud. So might the brokers, appraisers, notaries, title agents, and ultimately the bankers who were in on the deals, some of them showing up again and again. Everyone was making money on Sonny Kim’s business, and t

Fractional reserve banking, or maturity mismatching more generally, is likely to continue to cause financial crises without a central bank using an elastic money supply to bail out these banks. But the presence of a central bank able to bail out the banks creates a major problem of moral hazard for these banks. They can now take excessive risks kno

All of these new credit arrangements were mediated not by interpersonal relations of trust but by profit-seeking corporations, and one of the earliest and greatest political victories of the U.S. credit-card industry was the elimination of all legal restrictions on what they could charge as interest.

The track record of the 46‐year experiment with unsound money bears out this conclusion. Savings rates have been declining across the developed countries, dropping to very low levels, while personal, municipal, and national debts have increased to levels which would have seemed unimaginable in the past.

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