DOOM...and other discontents

Here's a quick jolt of DOOM to send you off with the metallic taste of defeat, despair, and ruin in your mouth.

California is so boned: San Jose, in the heart of high-tech silicon valley, is being pushed to the brink by lavish pension and benefit costs.

Detroit has passed the "boned" stage and is now lying in state in a casket in the parlor. Visitors are encouraged to donate money to the pension fund in lieu of flowers.

Number of NJ retirees who have $100K+ pensions climbs 75 percent in three years.

Megan McArdle thinks the collapse of the Mt Gox echange will spell DOOM for Bitcoin, but I don't agree. Mt Gox is just an exchange, and there are other exchanges. The currency has always been wildly volatile, but it fills a niche. And even if the currency itself does collapse, other digital cryptocurrencies will rise to take its place because the demand is there. (The Mt Gox CEO responds with a non-response.)

More on the demise of the Mt Gox Bitcoin exchange. There's a reason that trust networks are a necessary part of a viable currency regime.

E. J. Dionne has probably never read so much as a paragraph of anything by Mises or Hayek. I think we can take that as a given. But then, there is a long-standing disdain for the Austrian School of economics in both the academic world and the public-policy world. Yet the love for Keynesianism (or modern variants thereof) continues unabated in those precincts, despite a century of miserable failure of the Keynesian principles. If you're struck by the parallels with Marxist theory, well...you're not alone. It's just more proof to me that for a leftist, ideology trumps everything else, even personal well-being.

Twinkies Bankruptcy Raises Specter of U.S. Pension Fund Failures. Wait, what?

posted by Monty at 09:02 AM

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