Wednesday update: Swanson profiles Cochrane; Benko recounts fiat money's political disorders; Laffer talks inflation.

From Forbes, Bret Swanson surveys the compelling opinions of University of Chicago economist John Cochrane.

AT TGSN, Ralph Benko recounts the dollar standard’s three political disorders (here, here and here).

On The Kudlow Report, Art Laffer discusses the producer price index’s surge:



At RCM, John Tamny advises Japan to avoid bad economics as it strives to recover.

In The Journal, James Grant reviews Douglas Irwin’s book on Smoot-Hawley.

From Bloomberg, Caroline Baum notes Bastiat’s counter to Keynesian ideas about government projects creating prosperity.

From Mises.org, David Stockman unleashes on the 2008 bailout and the dollar standard:

Viewed more broadly, the carnage on Wall Street in September 2008 was the inevitable crash of a 40-year financial bubble spawned by the Fed after Nixon closed the gold window in August 1971. As time passed, the Fed's market-rigging and money-printing actions had become increasingly destructive — leaving the banking system ever more unstable and populated with a growing bevy of Too Big to Fail institutions.

The 1984 rescue of Continental Illinois; the 1994 Mexican peso crisis bailouts; the Fed's 1998 life-support operation for LTCM — were all just steps along the way to the fall of 2008.

Then, faced with the collapse of their own handiwork, Washington panicked and joined the Fed in unleashing an indiscriminate bailout capitalism that has now thoroughly corrupted the halls of government, even as it has become a debilitating blight on the free market.

In The WSJ, Newt Gingrich and Peter Ferrara advocate making the Bush tax rates permanent.

At The Journal, Stephen Moore reports congressional conservatives are unsatisfied with the pace of spending cuts.

On the Peter Peterson funded Fiscal Times, James C. Cooper cites weak dollar advocate Fred Bergsten (of the Peterson Institute for International Economics) calling for dollar depreciation to boost exports. The irony is, the biggest barrier to US exports is the dollar standard Bergsten helped create in the 1970s.

At Mises.org, Frank Shostak argues economic growth doesn’t cause inflation.