ONE STOP GUIDE TO THE ECONOMIC CRACKUP

All you need to know to understand the current economic bust in 36 little articles:

• Mark Thornton, “The Housing Bubble in 4 Easy Steps”
• Gerald O’Driscoll, Jr.  “To Prevent Bubbles, Restrain the Fed”
• James Gwartney, “On The Fed and Greenspan”
• Michael Lewis, “Inside the Wall Street Doomsday Machine”
• John Taylor, “An Empirical Analysis of What Went Wrong” (pdf)
• OC Register, “How Subprime Lending All Started in OC”
• Peter Wallison, “Goverment Policies and the Financial Crisis”
• Jim Grant, “Is the Medicine Worse Than the Illness?”
• David Rose & Larry White, “We Can’t Spend Our Way Out of This Quagmire”
• Arnold Kling, “Why Credit Default Swaps?”
• Mike Shedlock, “Krugman Still Wrong After All These Years”
• Steve Sailer, “Predatory Mortgage Lenders”
• The Wall Street Journal, “Lender Lobbying Blitz Abetted Mortgage Mess”
• Russ Roberts — “How the Government Stoked the Mania”
• Anonymous, “A Worm’s-Eye View of Wall Street”
• The NY Times, “Inside Washington Mutual”
• Mike Shedlock, “Time to Break Up the Credit Rating Cartel”
• William Black, “Fiddling While Rome Burns”
• The Washington Post, “The Crash:  What Went Wrong”
• Lawrence White, “What Really Happened”
• The NY Times, “White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire”
• Martin Baily, et al, “The Origins of the Financial Crisis”
• Steve Sailer, “The Diversity Recession”
• Richard Wagner, “A Remarkable Question”
• George Selgin, “Guilty as Charged”
• Gerald O’Driscoll, Jr. — “Subprime Monetary Policy”
• Steve Sailer, “Karl Rove — Architect of the Minority Mortgage Meltdown”
• Lawrence White, “How Did We Get Into This Financial Mess?”
• Warren Coats, “The D E Fs of the Financial Markets Crisis”
• Arnold Kling, “My Planned Oral Remarks on Freddie & Fannie”
• Mike Shedlock, “Time to Break Up the Credit Rating Cartel”
• John Cassidy, “Anatomy of a Meltdown”
• William Black, “Adam Smith Was Right About CEO Incentives”
• Sebastian Mallaby, “Blaming Deregulation”
• The WSJ, “The Weekend That Wall Street Died”
• Tyler Cowen, “Bailout of Long-Term Capital”
• Arnold Kling, “Testimony on the Collapse of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac” (pdf)
• Robert Higgs, “Lucas and the Fed”
• Wikipedia, “The Greenspan Put”

The Mises Institute also has a good compendium of articles on the current crisis collected at The Bailout Reader.  And REASON magazine has one here.  See also The Housing Bubble Hall of Shame, Mortgage Fraud Blog, HousingBubbleBust.com, The Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter, The Home Builder Implode-O-Meter, The Hedge Fund Implode-O-Meter, and The Bank Implode-O-Meter.

And for the best continuing analysis of the meltdown see: Calculated Risk, Mish’s Global Analysis, EconLog, Cafe Hayek,Mises Institute, The Mark Levin Show, Division of Labour, Peter Schiff, The Austrian Economists, The Cato Insitute, The Heritage Foundation, and American Enterprise Insitute.

Want to dig a bit deeper?  What to understand the economics behind the boom and bust cycle? Well, this is your chance.  Here’s how.  Read one or two of these books and articles by Friedrich Hayek or these essays by Roger Garrison or this book and these articles by Gerald O’Driscoll or this book by Henry Hazlitt, or any one of these books and articles
by a variety of other authors. Read some of this stuff and trust me, you will be smarter than a smarty pants macroeconomist in the Ivy League.  Don’t have time for the long stuff?  Here are some shorter things for beginners or those just pressed for time:

• Roger Garrison — “Business Cycles”
• Roger Garrison — “Capital Based Macroeconomics”
• F. A. Hayek — “Can We Still Avoid Inflation?”
• F. A. Hayek — “The Pretense of Knowledge” — Hayek’s Nobel lecture

BONUS MATERIAL

Watch Fred Thompson explain how the Keynesian economics of Bush and Obama will save America:

And see Dan Mitchell explain the wonders of Keynesian economics in this video:

Read about how Hoover-Roosevelt and the Federal Reserve created the Great Depression:

• Jim Powell, “Tough Questions for the Founders of the New Deal”
• Burton Folsom, Jr.  New Deal or Raw Deal, chapter 1.
• Jim Powell, “How FDR’s New Deal Harmed Millions of Poor People”
• Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man.
• Murray Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (pdf).
• Ivan Pongracic, Jr., “The Great Depression According to Milton Friedman”
• Price Fishback, “Did Keynesian ‘Stimulus’ End The Great Depression?”
• Lawrence Reed, “Great Myths of the Great Depression”